What Is Cloud Data Protection?

As digital migration to the cloud accelerates at an unprecedented rate, so do cloud security risks, necessitating robust cloud data protection measures. Accessing data from the cloud is convenient, but it also comes with its own set of cloud data security risks.

As the global average cost of a data breach jumps to $4.88 million and thousands of data breaches occur daily, protecting sensitive data from evolving cyber threats, data breaches, and exposure is more critical than ever.

More enterprises are exploring a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud approach rather than just using a public cloud or private cloud strategy, and 80% of organizations are already using multiple public or private clouds. Cloud adoption is only going to increase, calling for robust cloud data protection measures.

What is Cloud Data Protection?

Cloud data protection is the process of securing an organization's data in a cloud environment, regardless of its location, whether it is in motion or at rest, and whether it is handled by the organization itself or by a third party.

Why Do You Need Cloud Data Protection?

Organizations are collecting, processing, and sharing vast volumes of data, from non-sensitive data to extremely sensitive data such as financial records, consumers’ personal attributes, and an organization’s confidential data.

This massive influx of data is no longer being stored in on-premises data centers but instead in diverse data environments, including SaaS, public, private, and hybrid clouds, and cloud storage environments.

Consequently, the first step in cloud data protection is gaining a holistic understanding of where data resides, who it belongs to, and who has access to it. This is primarily important as personal and sensitive data is subject to safeguards under data privacy regulations such as the EU’s GDPR, CPRA, LGPD, etc.

Cloud data protection ensures data security against evolving security risks, theft, exposure, accidental loss, and unauthorized access to data stored (at rest) or moved in and out of the cloud (in motion).

Benefits of Cloud Data Protection

The key to effective cloud data protection involves a combination of controls and mechanisms that organizations must enforce, including:

Enhanced Security, Privacy and Compliance

By implementing encryption (e.g., TLS, AES-256), access controls (e.g., multi-factor authentication), comprehensive policies, and compliance frameworks, organizations can ensure data security and privacy and comply with evolving regulatory requirements under data privacy regulations such as the GDPR, CPRA, LGPD, HIPAA, etc.

Reliability and Availability of Data/Applications

With cloud data secured, organizations can continue to operate without serious downtime or data loss. This ensures that data and apps are readily available, unaffected by sudden breakdowns, and recoverable in the event of downtime.

Data Portability Across Locations and Devices

Protected cloud data empowers businesses and individuals by enabling swift accessibility across geographies. As data is secured during transit and at rest, both businesses and individuals can collaborate easily across multiple locations and devices, ensuring efficiency, portability, and security.

Reduced Costs Over Traditional Models

Traditional models are often located on-premises, requiring space, constant resources, and high operational and maintenance costs. These legacy models become relatively outdated quickly and need to be replaced entirely. Modern cloud-based models eliminate resource-intensive hardware and infrastructure costs, reduce maintenance and upkeep costs, are easily scalable, and come equipped with reduced downtime and built-in security protocols that provide a better experience.

Scalability to Accommodate Growth

As businesses grow and collect more data, the need for flexible and scalable cloud data solutions that quickly accommodate their evolving requirements increases. Cloud data protection enables businesses to quickly extend storage capabilities and enhance security as needed without incurring major costs in adopting new hardware. With this scalability, businesses can conveniently accommodate unforeseen growth without compromising an individual’s sensitive data, data privacy, or security.

Cloud Data Protection Challenges

Although migrating to the cloud comes packed with its set of benefits, cloud data protection does come with certain challenges, including:

Inherent Privacy and Security Risks

Storing sensitive data in the cloud is convenient. However, the cloud's inherent connection to the Internet attracts malicious actors and exposes data to cyber threats, such as ransomware, hacking, etc.

Data Discovery

Data is stored in multiple locations, in different formats, and across multiple cloud services. Moreover, it isn’t stagnant; it keeps growing in size and volume. When data proliferates in a multi-cloud environment, it becomes even more challenging to identify it, tag it, and govern it.

Data Security & Access Governance

The lack of insights into business or sensitive data further hinders an organization’s efforts to ensure cloud data protection. A multi-cloud environment involves multiple cloud services, and each service provider has different native security settings and configurations.

Without a comprehensive view of cloud configurations, organizations are unable to fix misconfigurations, which might lead to security breaches, unauthorized access, and similar security threats. Similarly, a lack of sensitive data insights hinders organizations from understanding who can access data, how frequently they access it, from which geographies they access it, and what level of privilege they have been assigned.

Data Sovereignty

Organizations must collect, process, store, and share user data in a compliant fashion. Take, for instance, data sovereignty or cross-border data regulation requirements. These regulations limit the sharing of data across borders, and if the need arises, it must be shared in a manner that is outlined in the applicable regulation. Without knowing what data you have, its residency, and what data sovereignty regulations apply to it, compliance becomes difficult.

Data Compliance

Compliance requirements aren’t limited to global data privacy laws but extend to industry-specific regulations as well, such as PCI DSS, NIST, etc. Moreover, an organization can be obligated to multiple regulations or standards at a time depending on the type of data it collects, its residency, and its industry. Meeting these requirements is fairly challenging because regulations require different controls to protect and govern sensitive data.

Data Cataloging

Businesses require more collaboration between teams and departments for effective data analysis or business decision-making. However, effective collaboration is often difficult to achieve since data is often found to be in silos across the organization. Every department works with its own set of tools to analyze data. In fact, every department has a different understanding of data due to a lack of common grammar or business glossary. Hence, data cataloging is often challenging to implement in a cloud environment, which ultimately affects data governance processes.

Regulatory Compliance

Data from across the globe can reside in a single cloud data source. This source might contain data from individuals in various jurisdictions and be subject to multiple regulations. Ensuring data residency and maintaining regulatory compliance with such data can be challenging.

Cloud Data Protection Best Practices

Ensuring data protection, compliance and constant uptime requires major upkeep. Best practices include:

• Implementing robust encryption to encrypt data at rest, in transit, and during processing to prevent eavesdropping and data falling into the wrong hands.
• Establishing access controls by enabling multi-factor authentication to limit role-based access.
• Conducting comprehensive risk assessments to analyze the existing security posture of systems and identify vulnerabilities so they may get patched.
• Complying with applicable regulatory frameworks such as GDPR, NIST Cybersecurity Framework, ISO Standards, PCI DSS, etc.
• Reviewing third-party integrations and requesting an audit report of all third-parties.

Automate Cloud Data Protection with Securiti

Securiti's Data Command Center replaces the decentralized approach by empowering organizations worldwide to secure data assets scattered across multiple systems and networks, including multiple public clouds, data clouds, on-premises, SaaS applications, and data flows via a centralized data command center. Securiti’s Data Command Center enables organizations to:

• Gain deep contextual intelligence and visibility of the corporate data landscape;
• Unify data discovery, classification and cataloging, data lineage, access governance and control, and cloud security posture management processes;
• Discover shadow and cloud-native data assets to identify and mitigate misconfiguration risks;
• Improve the overall security posture with sensitive data-driven rules and honor cross-border data transfer obligations;
• Swiftly respond to security breaches; and
• Enforce least-privileged access controls and dynamically mask sensitive data across large, multi-cloud environments.

Data Command Center serves as the organization’s centralized data command center, enabling organizations to meet data privacy, governance, and compliance obligations and eliminating the cost and complexity of implementing several technologies across organizational silos.

Request a demo to learn more.

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