Without cybersecurity, your organization is vulnerable on many fronts, making it a crucial part of your business operations. But let’s be honest. Everyone knows that cybersecurity can be a cost center and can slow down business processes. That’s why it is important to select and implement data security solutions. These solutions should not only protect your organization but also enable faster, more effective operations, and strategic planning to achieve quarterly and YoY goals.
Below, we will discuss why data protection is such a crucial pillar of cybersecurity and how organizations have found ways to get robust ROI from their data protection solutions.
WHY IS DATA SO VULNERABLE?
Cybercriminals have some common motives: create chaos, make a political statement, or make money. They often make money by stealing and then reselling intellectual property or sensitive data, which comes in the form of personally identifiable information (PII), protected health information (PHI), or financial information (credit card and bank account numbers or PAN). They also make money by holding sensitive data hostage until the target of their ransomware attack pays a ransom fee. Since data breaches can be very lucrative for cybercriminals, it is no surprise that they are rampant and exceedingly more common.
Cybercriminals are also aware that it can be very easy to steal sensitive data simply because data is ubiquitous and abundant.
There is always some data somewhere that is ripe for the picking and easy to pick. Since data frequently moves from one location to another and may be stored in less-than-secure locations, it can often be put invulnerable positions as it moves and rests.
A PATCHWORK QUILT OF DATA TOOLS AND PROCESSES
Cybersecurity professionals constantly grapple with how to keep data safe from cyberthieves without compromising data compliance, privacy, or security. The traditional method is to limit data use and access, lock data behind firewalls, and guard the perimeter. Unfortunately, traditional data approaches don’t even protect the data 100%, so data professionals still can’t have peace of mind.
Teams often use ad hoc solutions for data security with no centralized management or control, creating a patchwork landscape. Without a single centralized solution to rely upon, compliance officers and the information security teams may struggle to gain full visibility into data protection practices across the organization and to provide clear, concise feedback and recommendations to developers and app architects.
ROADBLOCKS TO DATA USE AND ANALYSIS
Furthermore, legacy data protections impede the flow of business and digital transformation which means organizations may have an ocean of valuable data but not a drop to drink.
Business managers need data for a variety of use cases. However, data security and compliance officers often find it hard to accommodate their requests and provide simple, workable solutions for data usage because the available technology cannot deliver data in a secure or compliant way. It is nearly impossible to share data internally, never mind externally, with third parties or with AI and ML applications to conduct data analysis.
When organizational data is siloed regionally and difficult to move, an organization can perform analytics only on small slices of data.
PROTEGRITY VAULTLESS TOKENIZATION TO THE RESCUE
Tokenization protects sensitive data by replacing it with alias values or tokens that are meaningless to someone who gains unauthorized access to the data. Yet there are key differences between tokenization technologies. Vaulted tokenization relies on token vaults that quickly become too large and expensive for organizations to manage. As the data volume grows, it becomes more time-consuming and difficult to run a simple query. Organizations also seek to avoid storing sensitive data. Vaultless Tokenization solves that problem. When there is no “vault” for sensitive data, the data is never stored. The data may be “at rest,” but it is not stored.
A CASE STUDY REPORTED BY FORRESTER
To quantifythe benefits of using the Protegrity Data Protection platform, Forresterrecently interviewed one of Protegrity’s customers in the financial serviceindustry and compiled a Total Economic Impact report [1] [2] as a result. Using its methodology,Forrester estimates that this financial services customer will receive $2.6M efficiency gains for app builders, $1.8M cost savings from sunsetting legacy technology and infrastructures, and $13.7M in improved revenue in eight months over a 3-yearspan due to the following efficiency gains:
- LOB managers in marketing, planning, and other departments can leverage advanced analytics and business insights tools to run customer rewards and loyalty programs and make better decisions about product offerings
- Customer support/service teams can access global customer records, so they can serve any customer from anywhere
- Reduced costs of compliance because application builders spend much less time building data security and compliance into new applications and services, and security teams have a standardized set of tools to reduce the complexity involved with data protection and to standardize processes across the organization
- Security and IT teams were able to sunset legacy applications and decommission token vaults that no longer served the organization
- Data analysts can securely share data with outside partners and trusted third parties
When choosing which cybersecurity initiatives are most important, information security professionals must carefully weigh the financial impact of each initiative; i.e., which technologies prevent a cyberattack disaster, which ones optimize business, and which ones accomplish both objectives.
By being able to protect data more efficiently to ensure compliance and unlock protected data for authorized users, companies can leverage their data more effectively, which, in turn, improves their revenue and their bottom line.
Discover how Protegrity’s data protection solutions can accelerate your enterprise and operational efficiencies while increasing YoY revenue by exploring our solutions today.