Data protection - A dominant theme across Gartner’s top security and risk trends 2022!

Gartner recently published their Top Security and Risk Trends for 2022. Many of the trends resonated strongly with us as we are experiencing them first-hand through our customers.

Attack surface is expanding as enterprises adopt cloud applications and databases to drive business growth. They face digital supply chain risks from the 3rd party vendor APIs used to share data. Over-provisioning users and roles in Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems are very common. Over-provisioning opens up larger attack surfaces. Protecting against leaked credentials 

On the organizational trends, security and risk teams are building stronger relationships with their peers on strategic planning and risk management than responding to security incidents and stopping data breaches. Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) are increasingly focused on raising cyber-awareness within the organization's rank and file, building a culture of cyber judgment, wherein business leaders make informed risk decisions about their function. 

One great example of such a partnership that we see among our customers is the one between the CISO and Chief Data Officer (CDO). These businesses have Data & Analytics (D&A) teams that harness operational and analytical data as a strategic differentiator for growth. Their cutting-edge data architecture is based on cloud data environments such as AWS Redshift, S3, and Snowflake, with data being shared with 3rd party vendors over APIs.

In such environments, security teams and data teams must have a unified view of all the data and associated security risks. Both teams need to have a clear view of - 

• the financial value of the data
• the location of sensitive data and location of data access
• the access permissions and query behavior for internal users
• the risks from sharing data with 3rd party vendors

This empowers both teams to collaborate in real-time and proactively mitigate any risks posed to sensitive data from ransomware attacks, data breaches, or internal threats. This is how our customers harness the full potential of Data & Analytics while maintaining a strong security posture.

The top trends listed by Gartner reemphasizes the need to build good data protection practices pro-actively. Based on what we are seeing, the cost of a data breach of the risks associated with data goes beyond just the fines and headlines. It can lead to long-term reputation damage and, in many cases, has also caused businesses to be shut down too. 

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