Unlock Data-Driven Value with Data Security

The Keys to Become a Data-Driven Organization

Only 26.5% of organizations say they’ve reached their goals of becoming a data-driven organization, according to NewVantage Partners’ Data and AI Leadership Executive Survey 2022. Astonishingly, this leaves three-quarters of those surveyed indicating they’ve not met their goals in this area.

Fortunately, there are some bright points on the horizon. A recent Gartner survey says 78% of CFOs will increase or maintain enterprise digital investments. And Gartner forecasts worldwide IT spending will grow 3% in 2022. Further, a Gartner CDO survey indicated top-performing CDOs are significantly more likely to have projects with the CEO, and they engage in value delivery rather than enablement.

While this is great progress, perhaps one of the most important points of agreement is how to balance business value creation with risk and compliance mandates.

Business value creation vs. risk, security, privacy, and compliance

For many organizations, the conversation of balancing business value and security is cast through industry regulations. But it remains important for organizations to truly understand and agree on how and where you define your stance.

The crux is there’s no one size that fits all. But there are universal ways to mitigate risks and meet compliance mandates. For instance, if the use of PII data in certain analytical scenarios isn’t allowed, that doesn’t imply you should scrap the analytical project. You can mask or remove PII-related information and continue with your analytical projects.

Defining the value created from data is fairly nuanced. Many companies struggle to agree on a unified lens through which to view their data’s value. To simplify, your organization can view your data through the filter of four categories:

1. Direct attributed revenue
2. Indirect attributed revenue
3. Cost savings and optimization
4. Risk and compliance failure avoidance

Balance data democratization and security at scale

Once your organization has defined guidelines and policies on how to treat regulated data, the biggest challenge is to enforce those policies at scale. A comprehensive data security and access governance framework can go a long way to help you frame your approach.

• Perimeter-based security: In an on-premises world, your network is the gateway to the kingdom. If you lock that down, you may have the pretense of safety from the outside world. Internally, though, there’s still full access. The challenge is even larger in the cloud.

• Application security: The next level of defense is to provide authentication for accessing applications. In this model, getting access to the network only gets you so far unless your credentials allow you access to the application you’re trying to use.

• Data security: The last mile of your defense is data security. If someone gets through all the security layers, for example, you can still ensure access. Privacy is defined at the data level, so only authorized data is visible. Making sure fine-grained data access policies—as well as data masking and encryption—are applied down to the file, column, row, and cell is one of the most powerful ways to strengthen your security posture.

Enforcing these security protocols across your entire data estate is a massive challenge. And you can’t scale if executed in a siloed piecemeal fashion.

Universal data security platform

One of the emerging patterns for modern data infrastructure is that data governance and security processes need to become a horizontal competency across your entire data estate. This requires one of the most important C-suite dialogues between the CISO, CDAO, and CIO, since co-ownership across these groups is essential.

Universal data security platforms provide a central policy control plane that natively synchronizes policies into each distinct data service. Policies are created once and deployed everywhere. In addition, it provides a single view into your data estate, sensitive data locations, policies applied, and access events. Privacera works with Fortune 100 and 500 companies to reach their data security goals, including federal agencies and myriad types of enterprises across sectors. For example, Sun Life Financial teamed up with Privacera to secure and streamline their cloud-migration process, while seamlessly leveraging existing investments thanks to the open-standards framework. For more information on how to start or continue your data security journey, contact Privacera’s Center of Excellence.