How Sensitive Data Sprawl is Hurting Your Organization’s Data Management
Any data security officer will tell you that protecting sensitive data is a constantly-evolving uphill battle. The threat landscape is always changing, while new vulnerabilities are discovered at an ever-increasing (and frightening) rate.
The accelerating sprawl of sensitive data in enterprise environments only complicates this challenge. In most companies, data security officers simply have a bigger and growing footprint of sensitive data to protect. But letting sensitive data sprawl grow within organizations is unsustainable in the long term at best and dangerous at worst.
The best way to solve an issue is to recognize that the problem exists and then identify its root causes. Sensitive data sprawl is no different. Nipping the issue in the bud with full knowledge of what is being prevented will allow enterprises to circumvent all of the issues that sensitive data sprawl can cause.
What is Sensitive Data Sprawl?
Sensitive data sprawl refers to the widespread and often uncontrolled distribution of sensitive information across various platforms and locations within an organization's IT environment. Sometimes, the sprawl extends beyond the organization’s perimeters to trusted third parties, such as offshore development teams or testers.
Today’s enterprise security leaders are aware of the propagation of sensitive data sprawl. In a recent poll of 61 enterprise CISOs conducted by Bob Bragdon of RiskStrat Advisory, over 90% of respondents reported that innovation projects are expanding the footprint of sensitive data “somewhat” or “a great deal.”
Regardless, sensitive data, such as personally identifiable information (PII), financial records, intellectual property, and health records, can end up being stored in multiple, potentially unsecured locations, including on-premises servers, cloud storage systems, laptops, mobile devices, and third-party applications. The sprawl makes it challenging to track and secure this data, leading to increased risks of unauthorized access, data breaches, and non-compliance with data protection regulations.
The Leading Driver of Sensitive Data Sprawl
Many factors drive sensitive data sprawl. The most commonly cited are the increasing digitization of business processes, the adoption of cloud services, and the proliferation of mobile and remote work arrangements.
The biggest driver of sensitive data sprawl, however, is the skyrocketing number of non-production data environments. These non-production environments include development, testing, staging, and quality assurance (QA) environments, as well as many data stores used for analytics and AI model training. They can be found across on-premises data centers to public cloud services, and everywhere in between. They play a crucial role in the software development lifecycle, machine learning, building analytics pipelines, and other important activities of innovation. Many of these environments contain replicas of production data, much of which is sensitive.
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The number of non-production environments is increasing (sometimes rapidly) due to many factors indicative of modern IT:
Put more succinctly, the number of non-production environments in corporate IT departments is increasing due to the adoption of modern software development practices, the ease of creating and managing these environments through cloud and virtualization technologies, and the growing need for thorough testing and compliance with regulatory standards. This trend reflects the ongoing evolution of IT towards more agile, flexible, and quality-focused practices
The Impact of Sensitive Data Sprawl
The implications of sensitive data sprawl are significant and multifaceted. From a security standpoint, sensitive data sprawl amplifies the risk of data breaches and cyberattacks. This is due to the fact that the more dispersed the data is, the more difficult it becomes to implement consistent security measures and monitor all access points. Sensitive data sprawl also complicates compliance with data protection laws like GDPR, HIPAA, or CCPA, as organizations struggle to manage and control data spread across various non-production and production environments. Furthermore, it impedes effective data management and governance, making it hard to ensure data accuracy, prevent data redundancy, and maintain data integrity.
For businesses, these challenges translate into increased operational complexities, higher costs associated with data management and security, and potential reputational damage due to data mishandling. Therefore, addressing sensitive data sprawl is crucial for organizations to safeguard their data assets and maintain trust with customers and stakeholders.
In upcoming posts, I’ll discuss the failings of common approaches to mitigating the risks of sensitive data sprawl. Then I’ll suggest an alternative approach that combines data masking and database virtualization to both mitigate risks and make it easier for your developers and other innovators to do their jobs.
Todd Tucker
Mar 19, 2024