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You might think your organization doesn’t need a data security policy. All cybersecurity countermeasures protect data, don’t they? Yes and no. Data is important enough to merit its own dedicated security policy. Without one, you are vulnerable to costly attacks, regulatory penalties, and reputation damage. A thorough data security policy helps you avoid these negative outcomes. It forms the foundation for trust, compliance, and operational security.

The cyber threat environment certainly isn’t getting any less forgiving when it comes to protecting data. Data breaches in the third quarter of 2024 exposed more than 422 million records worldwide. Regulations affecting data security are also strict—and expensive if you don’t comply.

While IBM/Ponemon research says that a data breach costs $4.88 million to remediate on average, the numbers can get a lot more frightening than that. Meta paid $1.3 billion to settle EU data privacy violations in 2023. Amazon paid $877 million in a similar settlement in 2021. And, you’re probably thinking, if companies as well run and tech-savvy as Meta and Amazon can have data security problems like that, what am I doing about it? That’s where having a data security policy comes in.

What Is a Data Security Policy?

The term “data security policy” may be a little confusing, partly because any number of security policies related to data could be called “data security policies,” e.g., always encrypting data at rest. When an organization has a data security policy, sometimes called a data protection policy, it’s referring to a set of policies, practices, and controls that collectively have the goal of protecting the organization’s data from breach and other types of damage, such as ransomware.

A data security policy is often broad in scope, covering how data is handled, who is responsible for various data sets, and who can access them. These issues are more relevant than ever now that cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS) have become so commonplace. Data security policy overlaps with data governance, which is about ensuring data availability, security, and quality. Data security policy also embodies the many controls and steps required to protect data and maintain regulatory compliance. 

Why Does Your Organization Need a Data Security Policy?

Do you need a data security policy? Yes, and for several compelling reasons. The biggest driver of need is the confluence of rising data volumes, the distribution of data across multiple cloud platforms, and serious cyber threats and compliance requirements. These four forces combine to make it effectively non-negotiable that your organization have a coherent and thorough data security policy.

Of these issues, the proliferation of cloud and SaaS platforms is arguably the most serious challenge to data security. Employees now routinely store documents containing sensitive data on cloud volumes like Google Drive, often with open sharing settings. Notable SaaS data breaches include a 2023 hack of the Microsoft cloud that affected US government agencies.

The average business now has over 100 SaaS apps running, each of which can contain sensitive data—without anyone quite knowing where it all is. And, that’s not even considering the problem of “shadow SaaS,” which occurs when employees set up SaaS instances on their own without informing the IT department or security team.

All these factors add up to substantial data risk exposure. The stakes are certainly high. Data breaches are expensive to handle. They can trigger legal and regulatory problems that are costly to resolve, with fines for GDPR violations, for example, reaching into the millions. They disrupt business operations and potentially damage brands.

Done right, a data security policy goes a great distance to mitigating these risks and bolstering your overall security posture and compliance, including:

• Strengthening trust with customers and partners
  
• Facilitating proactive threat mitigation
  
• Strengthening the security of the SaaS ecosystem
  
• Aligning business operations with regulatory frameworks
  
• Reducing exposure from shadow IT and shadow SaaS
  
• Optimizing data governance and ownership
  
• Enables advanced incident containment strategies
  
• Supporting vendor risk assessments and monitoring
  
• Establishing a resilient compliance posture

7 Must-Haves for Every Data Security Policy

A sound data security policy comes to life through a collection of activities, workloads, and processes. It’s a good news/bad news situation. The good news is that many elements of a good policy already exist in your organization. For instance, you already have access controls. The bad, or at least challenging news is that you must align these elements, which may originate in multiple departments, with the data security policy, e.g., do your access controls support the objectives of the data security policy? With that in mind, here are seven “must haves” for every data security policy.

#1 – Comprehensive Data Inventory
A data security policy must be rooted in a comprehensive data inventory, which asks two basic questions: What data does your organization have? Where is it stored?

Both questions are deceptively simple. Regarding the data you have, this should include structured data found in databases and unstructured data, e.g., PDFs. Unstructured data might also comprise emails, instant messages, and rich media like audio and video recordings. You will almost certainly need an automated tool to discover all the data in your organization and its cloud instances.

Regarding where your data is stored, remember that the honest answer is “Almost anywhere, including places we haven’t thought of.” With a SaaS data discovery tool like Suridata, you can automatically scan numerous SaaS applications and find data that needs protection under the data security policy.

A related question is, “Who owns the data?” Each dataset in the inventory should ideally connect with a person or team responsible for maintaining data quality and following data lifecycle policies, e.g., deleting data over seven years old if that’s the rule.

#2 – Risk Assessment
With the data inventory in hand, you can now assess the risks each data set faces. You can take your choice of approaches to a data risk assessment, but the purpose is always the same: determining which data assets are at the highest risk for breach, and the impact of a breach. This requires ranking data by sensitivity and value. For example, a customer list may be more sensitive than a product list because the former contains personally identifiable information (PII), which is subject to privacy laws. The product list is probably already public, so breaching it means nothing.

The reason for this ranking is to prioritize protection. It’s impossible to apply the same level of protection to every data set. In this context, consider that data sensitivity and value may differ. Intellectual property (IP) data supporting your next patent could be worth billions of dollars. The business impact of an IP breach would be immense, so your IP might require the highest level of defense.

#3 – Access Control Policies
Who can access each data set? That’s a critical part of the data security policy. You already have some sort of access control mechanism in place, but you will likely have to adapt it to the data security policy. This may be because access is typically granted in your organization by network segment or application, not data. However, as data becomes subject to higher levels of protection, you will want to map access rights with data sets.

Indeed, you may already be working on some version of data-driven access controls if you’re implementing zero trust (ZT). ZT allows for granular grants of access down to the level of individual files, if necessary. If your organization is doing ZT, it’s a good idea to bring them into the process of developing the data security policy.

The best approach may be to use role-based access controls (RBACs), e.g., if your role is “Accounting Team Member,” then you should be allowed to see data that lets you do your job on the Accounting Team but not data for the Sales Team, and so forth. Defining and enforcing access control policies will invariably require using an identity and access management (IAM) system, such as Microsoft Entra ID, and SaaS security solutions like Suridata.

#4 – Real-Time Threat Detection
One of the more troubling aspects of serious data breaches is that attackers may be able to lurk inside your networks for months before being detected. A data security policy should mandate real-time threat detection. The goal is to prevent data breaches by responding to threats before they can cause too much damage. In some attack scenarios, such as ransomware, seconds count. The faster you can shut down an infected endpoint or stop ransomware from encrypting data, the more effective your data protections will be.

#5 – Misconfiguration Management
Software configurations, particularly in SaaS, can expose data to risk. For example, a SaaS app may allow public document sharing by default. This is an insecure configuration, one that needs to be hardened to prevent data leakage. However, keeping track of configurations across multiple SaaS apps can be difficult, especially considering that people outside of IT and Security can change their SaaS settings. An automated misconfiguration detection and remediation solution is essential for mitigating configuration risk.

#6 – Third-Party Integration Monitoring
Third-party applications can be a source of data risk exposure. With SaaS, for example, third-party plugins enable external apps to be treated as “users” of SaaS apps that contain your data. Your SaaS environment might have dozens or hundreds of such connections, any one of which could be insecure. The plugins themselves tend to be uneven in terms of quality and maintenance. For these reasons, the data security policy should incorporate third-party integration monitoring.

#7 – Data Encryption Standards
Some think that encryption is the only countermeasure required for data security. In reality, encryption is your last line of defense. Working from your data inventory and risk assessment, your data security policy should ensure that the most sensitive and valuable data sets receive the right levels of encryption. Again, with the sprawl of SaaS, you may leave some data unencrypted and at risk.

These seven are “must haves,” but there are more. Backup and recovery are important for ensuring data security. Incident response matters, as do audit logging and monitoring. And, while it’s not always the most effective way to defend against cyberattacks, employee training can help protect data. When employees understand, for instance, that they should not store sensitive data on public file drives, that can help avoid data security incidents.

How to Build and Implement a Data Security Policy

Realizing a data security policy means running herd on a variegated set of documents, programs, and people—especially people. Making a success of a data security policy is a human-centric activity. An effective data security policy will comprise people and organizational units who understand their roles in the policy and their responsibilities for policies and processes.

Practically speaking, a data security policy is like any other serious, large-scale security or governance program. It starts with a discovery and consensus-building process, followed by assignments of responsibility, with executive leadership and accountability at individual and team levels. It’s an ongoing workstream with regular assessments, course corrections, and updates.

The choice of tools matters. Suridata can help with the SaaS dimensions of a data security policy. The platform can automatically discover sensitive information across the SaaS ecosystem. It monitors SaaS apps for misconfigurations and automatically flags them for attention or automatically remediates them. In parallel, Suridata detects anomalies and policy violations, including external and anonymous data shares, which can be harmful leaks of important data, even if they are inadvertent.

Getting to a Successful Data Security Policy

Your organization needs a data security policy. The growing volumes and diversity of data, coupled with the cloud’s endless and hard-to-track potential for data storage, make data protection a high priority. The worsening threat environment and strict regulations affecting data make the matter all the more urgent.

However, a data security policy is only as strong as the tools and processes supporting it. Getting it right means embarking on a multi-step journey that includes action steps like building a comprehensive data inventory, conducting a risk assessment, evaluating and updating access controls, and more. Much of the time, the foundational elements of the data security policy already exist, but they need to be adapted for the policy. People are essential to success, too. Clear roles, responsibilities, and accountability will enable what can be a complex set of policies to come together to protect sensitive data.

Suridata provides you with the ability to proactively address the “must-haves” with its advanced SaaS scanning, detection, and monitoring capabilities.

To learn more about how Suridata can help you operationalize your data security policy, visit suridata.ai or our demo page.

If you hang around the IT world long enough, you’ll hear someone say, “This is not your father’s firewall” or router, or server… We have to update this idea for today’s dizzying rate of change in technology and cybersecurity. Now, it would be more like, “This is not your twin brother’s firewall.” Security managers face pressure to adapt quickly as big changes like remote work and the widespread embrace of SaaS force changes in security policy and strategy. This is the problem that adaptive security seeks to solve.

Adaptive security, as its name suggests, is an approach to cybersecurity that dynamically predicts threats and rapidly adapts to them—enabling better security outcomes by making threat prevention and incident response more able to handle the latest modes of attack. The security sector is responding favorably to the idea of adaptive security. One industry study, for example, predicts that the market for adaptive security products will reach $27 billion by 2029.

An Adaptive Security Platform (ASP) delivers adaptive security functionality. It uses real-time monitoring and analysis to adjust security policies and enforcement automatically in response to evolving threats. This article discusses how ASPs work. It examines why an Adaptive Security Platform is a wise investment and what makes for an effective solution.

What is Adaptive Security?

Adaptive security is, first and foremost, an approach to security. It’s not a product, per se. Rather, it’s a model, an architecture, and a set of ideas that ASPs bring to life. “Adaptive” is the key word here. An ASP helps the security operations center (SOC) adapt quickly to the newest threats. It achieves this goal by automatically and continuously monitoring user behavior and other activities across the entire attack surface, uncovering vulnerabilities, anomalies, and malicious traffic.

The ASP’s real time monitoring and user behavioral analytics enables the SOC to stop threats from becoming attacks. Getting there may involve predictive analytics and root cause analysis. The ASP then informs policy definition and enforcement, along with the nature of your countermeasures, so your security toolset can adapt continuously to newly perceived threats.

Adaptive security is a necessary evolution away from traditional approaches to security. It’s not as simple as a “before vs. after” story, but adaptive security imbues security with greater flexibility and dynamism than was previously available. The old approach to security focused on perimeter defenses, signature-based threat detection, and a generally siloed “small picture” view of the security landscape, e.g., data security, email security, network security, and so forth, instead of an overall risk mitigation strategy.

Many organizations have pursued adaptive modes of security even if they have not implemented an ASP or fully embraced the adaptive security approach. Companies that deploy endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions, for instance, are taking an adaptive approach to endpoint security.

What Is an Adaptive Security Platform and Why Do You Need One?

An adaptive security platform operationalizes the four core elements of an adaptive security strategy:

• Predict—Assessing and prioritizing risk exposure, driving changes in security posture by anticipating attacks across the full IT estate, including the cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
• Prevent—Dynamically defining and enforcing security policies that harden and isolate systems, preventing attacks in the process.
• Detect—Continuously monitoring users, systems, system activity, payloads, and network traffic to discover threats, incipient attacks, and attacks in progress.
• Respond—Containing and quickly remediating security incidents.

These four elements reinforce each other and operate in a mode of continuous updating and evolution. Data from prediction informs prevention, which informs detection, and so forth.

Why would you need an ASP? The main reason is that cybersecurity teams have had to adapt to rapid and simultaneous changes in the threat environment, business strategy, and employee behaviors. Consider that businesses started pursuing digital transformation strategies just as almost everyone was forced to work from home during COVID. At the same time, a great deal of IT moved off premises and into the cloud and SaaS environments.

While these changes were affecting security policies and operations, malicious actors have been busy coming up with increasingly dangerous and sophisticated threats. These include zero days, advanced persistent threats (APTs), and spear phishing, among many others. It’s been a difficult collection of forces to confront.

Just as businesses were changing the way they operated and freeing employees to work from home on personal devices, security teams were contending with a flood of serious threat vectors. This translates into a variety of novel risk scenarios. An employee accessing a SaaS app on a personal device through a home internet connection, for example, has the potential to put sensitive data at risk without anyone knowing about it. In this environment, an ASP starts to become mandatory.

An ASP mitigates risk as it enables the kind of digital agility businesses need to remain competitive. Other benefits include improved security outcomes through real time threat detection, a reduction in the attack surface, and a better user experience. Cyber defense can become proactive, versus reactive.

How to Select an Adaptive Security Platform for Your Needs

What should you pay attention to when selecting an adaptive security platform? There’s a lot to do here because adaptive security, by its nature, encompasses the complete spectrum of issues that arise in cybersecurity and digital business strategy. Here are seven steps to consider when selecting an ASP.

# 1—Consider Your Needs and Environment
What do you need from an ASP? An informed procurement decision needs to come from a careful assessment of your IT estate. This should include your on-premises digital assets and infrastructure, but also your cloud environments, SaaS apps, and third-party connections, e.g., API-based integrations with external companies. And, you should factor in how your end users expect to interact with the IT estate, and where they work. From this assessment emerges a total picture of what you have to defend. That’s your maximum ASP footprint.

Then, look at your threat landscape. What are the most serious threats you face? And, which of your assets need the most protection? If the maximum ASP footprint represents the most extensive deployment of the ASP, the threat assessment should narrow the scope so you can deploy the platform in the most impactful way possible.

At the same time, it’s a good idea to think through your overall business plans and examine how they affect your conception of an ASP. For example, if you’re on the verge of abolishing bring-your-own-device (BYOD) or work-from-home policies, that should change your plans for ASP implementation. Similarly, if you’re planning to phase in a big digital transformation that spreads your data across multiple cloud and SaaS instances, as well as third party kiosks and retail stores, that again should influence how you’re thinking about an ASP.

#2—Align with What You Already Have
It’s likely that you already have some elements of adaptive security at work in your environment. If you’re using an extended detection and response (XDR) solution, for instance, you may find that it is providing an adaptive security methodology to the areas of your IT estate that it covers. You may decide to phase out XDR and replace it with an ASP, but it might be smart to leave it alone and modify your ASP deployment instead.

#3—Maintain a Policy and Organizational Focus
An ASP must be a manifestation of security strategies and policies that fit within a specific organization context. It creates an adaptive security capability in service of security policies. Its functions and outputs will be relevant to people in distinct areas of the organization, such as the SOC or the compliance department. It’s a good idea to think through the policies and organizational aspects of the ASP when you’re evaluating your options.

#4—Pay Attention to Unintended Consequences
An ASP, like any broad-scoped and complex piece of technology, has the potential to create unintended consequences. For instance, will it create integrations that you will then have to support? If it requires the deployment of software agents, will those affect performance or create support headaches? Remember, too, that any platform you deploy will require at least one person (or partial person) to administer.

#5—Match Platform Capabilities to Your Requirements
With all of these factors in focus, you can now turn the platform’s actual capabilities. Evaluate how well the ASP succeeds or falls short on multiple fronts, including:

• Data protection mechanisms—How well does the ASP cover data assets? Like, does it continuously monitor data access requests and detect anomalous activities in databases?   
• API security—APIs represent a significant attack surface, one that can let malicious actors directly into your most sensitive digital assets. For this reason, an ASP’s API security capabilities, e.g., the ability to monitor API behavior or integrate with API security solutions, should have a high priority in selecting an ASP.
• User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA)—Anomalous end user behavior can signify the start of a cyberattack, so UEBA functionality, or the ability to integrate with a UEBA solution, is important in an ASP.
• Support for Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA)—If you’re like many organizations, you are probably embarking on a ZTA project, or have already done one. An ASP should be able to monitor network access requests, device verifications, and other elements of a ZTA.
• SIEM and SOAR integration—An ASP must be able to ingest data from security incident and event management (SIEM) systems. That’s part of the ASP’s continuous monitoring function. As incidents occur, the ASP must then integrate with a security orchestration and automated response (SOAR) solution so it can influence the incident response process.
• Logging, reporting, and forensics—The right ASP will provide you with rich logging and reporting outputs. You will need this information, along with forensics on security incidents, to realize the technology’s potential for continuous adaptation.
• SaaS security—SaaS apps represent a potentially dangerous blind spot for security managers. Often holding sensitive data, they may operate outside the view of traditional security monitoring tools. An ASP will ideally support SaaS security or integrate with a SaaS security platform. Suridata, for example, takes the principles of an ASP and applies them to securing SaaS applications. It helps organizations adapt their security measures to the dynamic nature of cloud-based software and the ever-evolving threat landscape in the SaaS world. Specifically, Suridata can perform dynamic risk assessment across the multi-app SaaS environment, monitor user behavior and third-party integrations, and check security configurations.

#6—Evaluate the Scalability of Security Policies 
The ASP has to scale your security policies as your IT estate grows and changes in accordance with shifts in business strategy. It cannot be rigid, and this is, believe it or not, a problem with some ASPs. It has to be highly adaptable to change.

#7—Analyze the ML and AI Capabilities 
An ASP will have some artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities. The question to ask, though, is how they work. AI and ML should not be a “black box.” Rather, you should understand how they “train,” the functional areas of the ASP they affect, and so forth.

Getting to Adaptive Security

Adaptive security is necessary today because the combination of increasingly agile business strategies and serious cyberthreats are making traditional forms of cybersecurity less effective at protecting digital assets. An ASP continuously monitors the cybersecurity environment and enables it to adapt rapidly to changes in threats and the IT estate.

The shift to cloud computing and SaaS may require the use of solutions like Suridata. It offers the adaptability enterprises need as their SaaS environments expand.

To learn more, visit https://suridata.ai or the company’s demo page.