In high-stakes sporting events — like the Super Bowl’s final drive or a match point at Wimbledon — every second matters. Look away for a moment just to refill your glass or get another snack, or have the streaming service lag behind, and you could miss the very play everyone will be talking about tomorrow.
Data security operates the same way. Losing sight of sensitive data, even briefly, can allow nefarious things to occur, changing the outcome before security teams know it happened.
In the cloud era, organizations have become reliant on observability tools to track availability and performance. Yet too often, they overlook the data itself and how it moves across systems, where it resides, and who has access. Some security controls are built into cloud service platforms, but they typically cannot monitor data movement, access, and risk in real-time. As a result, sensitive data like intellectual property, employee and customer information and more can easily be compromised, with breaches now costing businesses an average of $4.88 million per.
To change the narrative, it’s critical to understand why legacy security solutions no longer suffice, and what modern practices can strengthen data protection.
The Limits of Legacy Solutions
As IT teams attempt to manage sensitive data flows across the cloud, it becomes easy to lose track of where sensitive data is stored and how it’s being used.
Understanding the location of sensitive data in near real-time is crucial for ensuring proper hygiene, preventing compliance issues, mitigating unauthorized access, and effectively addressing data sprawl and proliferation. When data becomes “misplaced,” or stored outside its approved environment, it can easily eventually fall into the wrong hands. Attackers know this – and exploit these poorly managed ‘copies’ as they persist.
Unfortunately, the speed of data flows in vast cloud environments makes tracking data challenging, and traditional monitoring methods may fall short. Legacy security solutions were built for the on-premises era, where data remained more contained, and today’s dynamic cloud demands modern and more scalable approaches. Other limitations include:
- Failing to Scale: The volume of data grows exponentially as your organization continues to innovate rapidly and adopt more cloud services. When this happens, legacy security approaches start to crack and lag, becoming slow to respond to potential risks and opening companies up to possible breaches.
- Climbing Costs: Holding onto legacy security tools can become expensive quickly. Outdated security systems often incur high operational costs due to manual oversight, and inefficient scanning processes can result in excessive cloud usage.
- Lackluster Data Classification: Manual classification is error-prone, which makes it extremely challenging to identify and secure information promptly. These outdated methods particularly struggle with unstructured data, leaving significant visibility gaps.
Cloud Data Monitoring and Protection Best Practices
Implementing a cloud data protection monitoring strategy can help strengthen existing cloud tools and uplevel legacy systems. A strong approach combines automated data discovery, accurate classification, real-time activity monitoring, robust access governance, and continuous compliance validation to secure sensitive cloud data. Here’s why each element is important:
Data Discovery and Classification
Automated, agentless, cloud-native solutions enable security teams to continuously discover and classify sensitive data accurately without any performance impacts or gaps. The automation component can significantly reduce manual errors and deliver real-time insights for robust and efficient data monitoring. With deeper visibility into sensitive data, security teams can respond faster to threats without disrupting business operations.
Monitoring Data Activity
A fortified data security strategy will include well-monitored dashboards that can visualize data flows, alert statuses, and remediation steps to deliver actionable insights at a glance. These alerts can then feed into remediation platforms for a seamless response. In practice, this means teams can quickly trace where sensitive information has moved, spot anomalies such as unexpected transfers across regions, and cut off risky activity before it escalates.
Complete Access Governance
Before you can effectively prevent outsiders from exploiting sensitive data, it’s important to determine who should have access to it in the first place. Enforcing least privilege access and performing regular reviews help ensure compliance and reduce unnecessary exposure. It’s also important to have data security tools integrate with any existing identity management or access control system.
Finding the Right Data Security Platform
To complement other security practices, it’s critical to find a comprehensive data security platform. When evaluating different vendors, it’s important to ask the following questions:
- Does this enhance existing observability tools and existing SIEM or SOAR systems?
- Can it handle massive data volumes through cloud-native architectures at scale?
- Will it integrate with the organization’s primary cloud services and data stores?
- Can the tool automatically and unintrusively discover data, classify it, and continuously monitor it? Will the data always remain in the customer environment?
- Is there deep contextual analysis available to provide data insight, detect anomalies and enable proactive remediation in real-time?
Winning the Data Security Game
The stakes for protecting sensitive data are higher than ever. Just like missing a crucial moment in a sporting event, losing sight of your data can leave your organization exposed to significant risk and costly breaches.
By moving beyond legacy solutions, implementing proactive posture management and continuous monitoring, and deploying platforms designed for scale, organizations can ensure they never miss a critical play. Visibility, automation, and governance are no longer “nice-to-have” capabilities. They are the foundation for resilient, future-ready security.
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