Data Security is one of the most crucial issues that businesses must address today. Im glad to say that help has arrived.

This year, at Cybertech in Tel Aviv, some incredible new and innovative cyber security technologies were showcased. With more and more companies moving a lot of their technology stack to the cloud, it is no wonder that data privacy and protection solutions are at the forefront.

Before I highlight one of the solutions that stood out to me, let's start with some of the?most common features looked for by Atlantic Data Security, LLC 's clients.

• Access control: Ensuring that only authorized users have access to sensitive data and that access privileges are appropriately handled.
• Encrypting sensitive data in transit and at rest to prevent unauthorized access.
• Vulnerability management for continuous identification and correction of vulnerabilities in systems, networks, and applications to limit the risk of an attack.
• Incident response for developing and implementing plans for reacting to data security issues, including detection and notification of breaches, analysis, and remediation.
• Risk assessment for assessing the organization's data security posture and risk profile on a regular basis to find improvement opportunities.
• Compliance to ensure compliance with applicable laws, regulations, and industry standards pertaining to data privacy and security.

Prior to initiating a data security project, you must categorize the data to be protected. This task is either too vast or too expensive for the majority of clients, especially when using a system like BigID, which can be complicated to run, does not expand well to the cloud, where most of the data is today, and is very expensive.

This week at Cybertech , I was lucky enough to be able to sit down and have a conversation with Sharon Shaked and Tamar Bar-Ilan at Cyera 's Tel Aviv headquarters. Their name might ring a bell as they are one of the highly vetted Cyberstarts portfolio companies with additional investments by Sequoia Capital and Accel .

Cyera provides a full data protection platform that provides clients' data with context and management. They begin by offering visibility over all the client's sensitive data, context on the risk it poses, and security exposure. Cyera then automates the remediation to decrease the attack surface and guarantee operational resilience.

Tamar Bar-Ilan explained that their unique deployment methodology enables them to find all data repositories automatically and continually. Importantly, they will discover the data stores you are aware of, those you are unaware of, and those that will be developed in the future. He emphasized that this was accomplished without the need for custom connections or connection strings. Cyera also maintains an inventory of IaaS and PaaS storage buckets, native databases, and any databases running in compute, virtual machine, or container environments, as well as the folders and files in SaaS apps, all from a single platform.

As for categorization, they automatically identify and classify sensitive data and continuously scan a client's environment for new or modified data classes that may contain PII, PHI, PCI, IP data, or other secrets.?Credit card numbers and account numbers are readily identifiable and classifiable. The sensitivity of customer, employee, and business data is not always apparent to robots. Sharon Shaked offered an overview of their advanced categorization engine, which provides data with a unique identifier. It was quite remarkable.

Cyera ’s data analysis service offers definitions of hundreds of data kinds. When scanning a client's environment, their machine learning algorithms employ semantic classification to understand the features of their unique data classes and to increase the quality of current classifiers based on the dynamic nature of your data landscape.

Data security posture management (DSPM), which combines visibility into where sensitive data is, who has access to that data, how it has been used, and the security posture of the data itself, is another key topic.?Using this information, their system maintains a contextualized data risk assessment for each environment based on the data, identities, and access within. Cyera then uses prioritized rules to provide threat surface minimization guidance and automated remediation workflows based on defined security risk, regulatory, and compliance frameworks.

In my many years of delivering cyber security solutions to clients, I have encountered the dreadful acronym "DLP" all too often.?Over that time, I have seen many customers start and shelve projects because they are just too overwhelming. There are numerous new technologies that have made implementing a DLP a simpler operation. Cyera is not an outlier. Their service gives security teams visibility into data that is being moved, used, or stored in unauthorized locations, allowing them to enforce the proper security policies.?There are both predefined rules and a custom policy builder that enable the client to implement security measures based on the sensitivity of their data, the context in which it is accessed, and the location of their data. With specific treatment for security, compliance, and regulatory frameworks, this enables a customer to limit the risk of unintentional or inadvertent data loss and the exposure of sensitive data.

Compliance requirements are the next essential aspect of data security, especially for regulated businesses such as finance, healthcare, and manufacturing. Cyera enables security teams to enforce data access regulations to get least privileged access, maintain a strong security posture, and remain resilient against cyberthreats. Tamar Bar-Ilan and Sharon Shaked demonstrated how easy it is to gain access to highly permissive or unsafely structured and unstructured data, as well as the risk that this access poses depending on the sensitivity of the data and the frameworks that control its use. Their solution gives important information about local and programmatic data store users, the sensitive data to which they have access, and the things they do that make it more likely that sensitive data will be exposed, data will be lost, or ransomware will be used to take over the system. A requirement for every firm seeking a robust data compliance program and a simple way to communicate this information with auditors.

Sharon Shaked was also quick to point out that Cyera operates inside a robust eco system, and maintains integrations with a wide range of tools and platforms to ensure that clients' warnings and remediation guidance are compatible with their existing environment and workflows.

Overall, it's important to keep data safe in the cloud to protect sensitive information, keep up with privacy requirements, and get the most out of cloud services. I would suggest that anyone researching these service providers include Cyera on their list. The platform the team has put together is very impressive.