How Managed Data Security Can Benefit Your Business

Your business collects, stores and uses critical data on a daily basis. Not only do businesses hold a vast amount of data but they have hundreds, sometimes thousands, of databases and sub-databases. A business will have a database for their address book, another for leads, another for locations, and they are all interlinked to form a single GUI (Graphical User Interface) that the user will then see on their screen. But for online business you also have finance, banking, payment, credit card information, legal records, and these are the crown jewels of any business.

Which means that every organisation, regardless of size or sector, needs a strategy to protect and govern their critical databases to safeguard against both internal and external attacks and threats.

But many businesses are not prepared to tackle, spot, or respond to a data breach, despite knowing how sensitive and valuable their databases are. Infact, according to IBM’s report on the ‘Cost of a Data Breach’, the average cost of a breach is $3.86 million. And, as stated by IDG Research Services, ‘78% of IT leaders lack confidence in their companies cyber security posture’.

How Managed Data Security Can Improve Business Security

Managed Data Security protects critical databases, prevents leaks, and ensures compliance across heterogeneous environments, data warehouses and big data environments. It works by protecting structured and unstructured databases and enhances constant monitoring of structured and unstructured data tra­ffic.

It is used as a method to govern and control integration with IT management and additional security solutions. That way data protection is comprehensive and clear for all.

Eff­ective Compliance with validation activities, via a centralised audit repository, combined with an integrated workflow automation platform is necessary. Managed Data Security maintains this compliance element so that businesses can carry on with their activities, knowing that automation is speeding up their processes and improving time efficiency.

According to  Ali Al- Rubaya, Service Delivery Manager, SecurityHQ ‘Managed Data Security is an incredibly valuable tool to business, as it can be used to control and monitor auditable events from the chosen databases. This can be used, for instance, to monitor user behaviour in terms of the authentication against a database/databases, any inbound and outbound suspicious network traffic, and the detection of data exfiltration of large data transfers. By spotting potential malicious transfers quickly, businesses can respond to threats faster and, as a consequence, take actions to mitigate the threat and protect their data.’

The Benefits of Managed Data Security

There are multiple benefits of Managed Data Security, including the ability to:

• Track sensitive data in your environment.
• Provide complete visibility and detailed analysis into database transactions.
• Examine and implement policies, including access controls to sensitive data, database change control, and privileged user actions.
• Automate compliance auditing processes.
• Assess database vulnerabilities.
• Detect and track configuration flaws.
• Track movements of end users.
• Create a single, reliable, and integrated audit repository of heterogeneous systems and database.

What’s Next?

Once you understand the risks around databases, who is using them, when they are using them, identifying the risks around them, then the implementation of User Behaviour Analytics (UBA) can be used to categorise patterns of user behaviour, to understand what constitutes normal behaviour, and to detect abnormal activity.

By understanding those patterns, businesses gain greater visibility to create context driven use-cases, so that if an unusual action is made on a device on a given network, such as an employee login late at night, inconsistent remote access, or an unusually high number of downloads, the action and user is given a risk score based on their activity, patterns, and time.

To learn more about how UBA or Managed Data Security works, contact SecurityHQ, a managed security service provider that specialises in helping businesses to protect their databases from growing cyber threats. To speak with an expert click here.