How's Your Posture?

Hello, Data Security Devotees! Do you often ask yourself questions about your data security posture? Where is your data? How is it being secured? Has any of it moved recently? Are you sure??

This week, we’re discussing the concept of data security posture management (DSPM), a critical component of a comprehensive data security and cyber resilience strategy that addresses complex issues in modern cloud, SaaS, and on-premises environments—knowing where all your data is and how it is secured.?

We’ll cover the finer points of this practical approach and everything you can do to accomplish great posture below. Read on…?

What can you do pre-breach to reduce post-breach impact?

Today, data lives everywhere – many organizations have data residing across cloud, SaaS, and on-prem environments, making visibility difficult. And if you’re reading this, chances are your organization has had this type of issue: according to Rubrik Zero Labs, 98% of organizations report significant data visibility challenges. To make matters worse, the number of confirmed data breach incidents overall grew over 400% in the 5-year period from 2018 to 2023, according to the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report.

Today, bad actors aren’t breaking in – instead, they are logging into organizations’ environments with compromised credentials. According to CrowdStrike research, 80% of cyber attacks exploit legitimate access credentials to avoid detection. Securing your data with perimeter defenses is no longer enough.?

Also, ransomware attacks have moved from the bad actor just encrypting data and demanding the organization pay a ransom to decrypt it, to the bad actor threatening to expose an organization’s sensitive data if the ransom isn’t paid. This is a technique known as double extortion.

In this threat landscape, the most effective strategy against sensitive data exfiltration is to improve your data security posture – making it harder for bad actors who enter your system to find, access, destroy, and steal your sensitive data. You want to reduce the impact of a cyber attack and reduce the risks of data exposure and exfiltration.

A robust DSPM solution is essential to proactively address these challenges. Some of the key benefits of a DSPM solution are:

• Gain visibility and control of your data: Automatically find and classify your sensitive data across structured, semi-structured and unstructured formats, in on-prem, cloud, and SaaS environments, so you can put security controls in place and reduce the risk of data theft.
• Intelligent classification: Employs advanced techniques beyond regular expression matching to reduce false positives/negatives and properly classify sensitive data.
• Proactively reduce data exposure risk with a customizable policy framework: Automatically identify at-risk data, such as unencrypted or publicly exposed confidential records. Use built-in data security policies to continuously get alerted to sensitive data that is overexposed, unprotected, misplaced, or redundant. Create custom policies to meet your organization’s unique requirements.
• Minimize the impact of security incidents: Monitor which identities have access to your organization’s most sensitive data so you can strategically manage access to that data
• Identify real threats to your data: Monitor data at its source, eliminating blind spots and getting alerted to anomalous and suspicious data activity as soon as it occurs.

No one is 100% immune from becoming ill. Similarly, no company can be 100% protected from a cyberattack. In many cases, organizations are even losing critical data. Research from Rubrik Zero Labs found that 93% of organizations conducted a formal data loss notification to a governing organization.?

So, what can be done when cyberattacks are inevitable? If you’re trying to reduce the risk of illness, humans can take a proactive approach by adopting a healthy lifestyle. If you’re a company trying to avoid a data breach, you can take proactive measures to reduce the risk of data exfiltration with, you guessed it, a data security posture management solution.?

Check out the table below to discover the similarities between taking a proactive approach to your health and taking a proactive approach to securing your data.

For more information, check out ‘Data Security Posture Management Demystified,’ a phenomenal blog on DSPM from Seema K.

How WalkMe Secures Its Sensitive Assets with Rubrik DSPM

WalkMe, the leading digital adoption platform, has seen massive growth in the past few years. This incredible growth brought forth a challenge for their team: handling continuous growth while ensuring the security of customer data. WalkMe? wanted to proactively ensure that their security controls in the cloud grew in tandem with their platform. That’s where Rubrik DSPM came into play.

WalkMe knew there were gaps in their existing approach and after testing, saw that Rubrik DSPM provided the necessary speed and ability to discover publicly exposed sensitive data in areas other vendors didn’t.

“We needed something more intuitive, faster, and a better fit for WalkMe’s needs. And this is where Rubrik DSPM stepped in.” - Dror Zilberman , Infrastructure & Cloud Team Lead at WalkMe

Rubrik tailored a solution specifically to WalkMe’s unique needs. Thanks to Rubrik DSPM, the entire WalkMe security team now has visibility into data security threats and can take action to remediate potential risks. The DevOps team also uses the solution in collaboration with security. Now, WalkMe can more readily assure their customers that they’re proactively covering their sensitive data—an important selling point as they continue their efforts as category creators.

Ready to get started on your journey towards complete cyber resilience with Rubrik DSPM? Demo Rubrik DSPM here.

Hungry for more Cyber Resilience Content?

Check out some of these highly recommended reads from Rubrik here:

?? Rubrik Announces Integration With Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) Sensitivity Labels by Filip Verloy (Read it here)

?? In her own words: What teaching at Stanford taught Anneka Gupta, Chief Product Officer at Rubrik (Read it here)

??All Eyes Are On Accelerating Data Security by Kyle Alspach, feat. Mike Tornincasa (Read it here)

?? From Techstrong TV: Discussing healthcare security challenges with Rick Bryant, Healthcare CTO at Rubrik (Watch it here)

?? War Fighting in Cybersecurity: Lessons from the Military with Renata Spinks (Listen here)

Rubrik is a cybersecurity company and our mission is to secure the world’s data. Zero Trust Data Security? helps organizations achieve business resilience against cyberattacks, malicious insiders, and operational disruptions. Rubrik Security Cloud, built with a Zero Trust design and powered by machine learning, delivers complete cyber resilience in a single platform across enterprise, cloud, and SaaS. Our platform automates data policy management and enforcement, safeguards sensitive data, delivers data threat analytics and response, and orchestrates rapid cyber and operational recovery.

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