Vulnerability Exploitability eXchange: Prioritize cybersecurity risk for the healthcare industry
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Diagnosing and treating chronic pain can be complex, difficult, and full of uncertainties for a patient and their treating physician. Depending on the condition of the patient and the knowledge of the physician, making the correct diagnosis takes time, and experimenting with different treatments might be required.
This trial-and-error process can leave the patient in a world of pain and confusion until the best remedies can be prescribed. It’s a situation similar to the daily struggle that many of today’s security operations teams face.
Screaming from the mountain tops “just patch it!” isn’t very helpful when security teams aren’t sure if applying a patch might create even worse issues like crashes, incompatibility, or downtime. Like a patient with chronic pain, they may not know the source of the pain in their system. Determining which vulnerabilities to prioritize patching, and ensuring those fixes actually leave you with a more secure system, is one of the hardest tasks a security team can face. This is where a Vulnerability Exploitability eXchange (VEX) comes in.
The point of VEX
In previous blogs, we’ve discussed how establishing visibility and awareness into patient safety and technology is vital to creating a resilient healthcare system. We’ve also looked at how combining software bills of materials (SBOM) with Google’s Supply chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA) framework can help build more secure technology that enables resilience.
The SBOM provides visibility into the software you’re using and where it comes from, while SLSA provides guidelines that help increase the integrity and security of software you then build. Rapid diagnostic assessments can be added to that equation with VEX, which the National Telecommunications and Information Administration describes as a “companion” document that lives side-by-side with SBOM.
To go back to our medical metaphor, VEX is a mechanism for software providers to tell security teams where to look for the source of the pain. VEX data can help with software audits when inventory and vulnerability data need to be captured at a specific point in time. That data also can be embedded into automated security tools to make it easier to prioritize vulnerability patching.
You can then think of SBOM as the prescription label on a bottle of medication, SLSA as the child-proof lid and tamper-proof seal guaranteeing the safety of the medication, and VEX as the bottle’s safety warnings. As a diagnostic aide, a VEX can help security teams make accurate diagnoses of “what could hurt” and system weaknesses before the bad guys do.
Yet making an accurate assessment of that threat model can be challenging, especially when looking at the software we use to run systems. The ability to quickly and accurately evaluate an organizations’ weaknesses and pain points can be vital to hastening response to a vulnerability and stopping cyberattacks before they become destructive. We believe that VEX is an important part of the equation to help secure the software supply chain.
As an example, look no further than the Apache Log4j vulnerabilities revealed in December 2021. Global industries including healthcare were dealt another blow when Apache’s Log4j 2 logging system was found to be so vulnerable that relatively unsophisticated threat actors could quickly infiltrate and take over systems. Through research conducted by Google and information contributed by CISA, we learned of examples of where vulnerabilities in Log4j 2, a single software component, could potentially impact thousands of companies using software that depend on it because of its near-ubiquitous use.
While a VEX would not capture zero-day vulnerabilities, it would be able to inform security teams of other known vulnerabilities in Log4j 2. Once vulnerabilities have been published, security teams could use SBOM to find them, and use VEX to understand if remediation is a priority or not.
How does VEX contribute to visibility?
A key reason we focus on visibility mechanisms like SBOM and SLSA is because they give us the ability to understand our risks. Without the ability to see into what we must protect, it can be difficult to determine how to quickly reduce risk.
Visibility is a crucial first step to stopping malicious hackers. Yet without context, visibility leaves security teams overwhelmed with data. Why? Well, where would you start when trying to mitigate the 30,000 known vulnerabilities affecting just open source software, according to the Open Source Vulnerabilities database(OSV)? NIST’s National Vulnerability Database (NVD) is tracking close to 181,000 vulnerabilities. We’ll be patching into the next millennium if we adopt a “patch everything” approach.
It’s impossible to address every vulnerability individually. To make progress, security teams need to be able to prioritize findings and go after the ones that will have the greatest impact first. The goal of a VEX artifact is to make prioritization a little easier.
While SBOMs are created or changed when the material included in a build is updated, VEXs are intended to be changed and distributed when a new vulnerability or threat has changed. This means that VEX and SBOM should be maintained separately. Since security researchers and organizations are constantly discovering new cybersecurity vulnerabilities and threats, a more dynamic mechanism like VEX can help ensure builders and operators have the ability to quickly ascertain the risks of the software they are using.
Let’s dig into this VEX example from CycloneDX. You can see the list of vulnerabilities found, third parties who track and report those vulnerabilities, vulnerability ratings per CVSS, and most importantly, a statement from the developer that guides the operator reading the VEX to those vulnerabilities that are exploitable and need to be protected. At the bottom, you’ll see the VEX “affects” an SBOM.
This information allows the user of the VEX document to refer to its companion SBOM. By necessity, the VEX is intentionally decoupled from the SBOM because they need to be updated at different times. A VEX document will need to be updated when new vulnerabilities emerge. An SBOM will need to be updated when changes to the software are made by a manufacturer. Although they can and need to be updated separately, the contents of each document can stay aligned because they are linked.
Increasing resilience powered by visibility—SBOM+VEX+SLSA
VEX could dramatically improve how security vulnerabilities are handled. It’s not uncommon to find operators buried in vulnerabilities, best-guessing the ones that need fixing, and trying to make sense of tens (and sometimes hundreds) of pages of documentation to determine the best, lowest impact fix.
With SBOM+SLSA+VEX, operators are using software-driven mechanisms to conduct analyses and evaluate risk instead of relying on intuition and best guesses. The tripartite SBOM+SLSA+VEX approach provides an up-to-date list of issues and perspective on what needs attention. This is a transformative development in security—enabling teams to get a better handle on doing vulnerability mitigation, starting where it could hurt the most.
Driven by repeated cyberattacks on critical infrastructure such as healthcare, government regulators have taken a more interested stance in software security and supply chains. Strengthening the effectiveness of SBOMs in the United States is a big part of the newly proposed Protecting and Transforming Cyber Health Care (PATCH) Act. The law would require medical device manufacturers adhere to minimum cybersecurity standards in their products, including the creation of SBOMs for their devices, and plans to monitor and patch any cybersecurity vulnerabilities that are discovered during the device’s lifetime.
Meanwhile, new draft medical device cybersecurity guidance from the FDA continues that agency’s involvement in aggressively encouraging medical device manufacturers to improve the cybersecurity resilience of their products. The White House spoke for SBOMs, as well. An Executive Order from May 2021 lays out requirements for secure software development, including the production and distribution of SBOM for software used by the federal government.
Regardless of how these initiatives pan out, Google believes controls like those provided by SBOM+SLSA+VEX are critical to protect software and build a resilient healthcare ecosystem. This approach provides detailed, critical risk exposure data to security teams so they can take necessary steps to reduce immediate and long-term risks.
What do we suggest you do?
At Google, we are working with the Open Source Security Foundation on supporting SBOM development. Our Know, Prevent, Fix report on secure software development creates a broader outline of how Google thinks about securing open source software from preventable vulnerabilities. You can read more about these efforts for securing workloads on Google Cloud from our Cloud Architecture Center. Take a look at Cloud Build, a Google Cloud service that can be used to generate up to SLSA Level 2 build artifacts.
Customers often have difficulty getting full visibility and control over vulnerabilities because of their dependence on open source software (OSS). Assured Open Source Software (Assured OSS) is the Google Cloud service that helps teams both secure the external OSS packages they use and overcome avoidable vulnerabilities by simply eliminating them from the code base. Finally, ask us about Google’s Cybersecurity Action Team, the world’s premier security advisory team and its singular mission supporting the security and digital transformation of governments, critical infrastructure, enterprises, and small businesses.
If you’re a software supplier, please consider our suggestions above. Whether you are or not, you should begin:
- Contractually mandating SBOM+VEX+SLSA (or their equivalent) artifacts to be provided for all new software.
- Train procurement teams to ask for and use SBOM+VEX+SLSA to make purchasing decisions. There should be no reason an organization procures software or hardware with known, preventable issues. Even if they do, the information these mechanisms provide should help security teams decide if they can live with the risks before equipment enters their networks.
- Establishing a governance program that ensures those who control procurement decisions are aware of and owning the risks associated with software they are buying.
- Enabling security teams to build pipelines to ingest SBOM+VEX+SLSA artifacts into their security operations and use it to strategically advise and drive mitigation activities.
At Google, we believe the path to resilience begins with building visibility and structural awareness into the software, hardware, and equipment it rides on as a critical first step. Time will tell if VEX becomes widely adopted, but the point behind it won’t change—we can’t know how we are vulnerable without visibility. VEX is an important concept in this regard.
Next month, we’ll be shifting gears slightly to focus on building resilience by establishing a security culture that obsesses over its patients and products.
2022’s First Cloud CISO Perspectives: Recap of the Megatrends, Releases and News
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I’m excited to share our first Cloud CISO Perspectives post of 2022. It’s already shaping up to be an eventful year for our industry and we’re only in month one. There’s a lot to recap in this post, including the U.S. government’s recent efforts to address critical security issues, like open source software security and zero trust architectures. We’ve also released new resources from our Google Cybersecurity Action Team like the Cloud Security Megatrends and the Boards of Directors whitepaper on cloud risk governance.
Cloud Security Megatrends
We’re often asked if the cloud is more secure than on-prem (and why) so we shared our answer in a recent blog post. At Google Cloud, security by design is our priority. We’ve long adopted zero-trust principles for our baseline security architectures and built a global network that relies on defense in depth layers to protect against configuration errors and attacks. But security is always evolving and that is why we also take advantage of the following megatrends:
- Economy of scale: Decreasing the marginal cost of security raises the baseline level of security.
- Shared fate: A flywheel of increasing trust drives more transition to the cloud, which compels even higher security and even more skin-in-the-game from the cloud provider.
- Healthy competition: The race by deep-pocketed cloud providers to create and implement leading security technologies is the tip of the spear of innovation.
- Cloud as the digital immune system: Every security update the cloud gives the customer is informed by some threat, vulnerability, or new attack technique often identified by someone else’s experience. Enterprise IT leaders use this accelerating feedback loop to get better protection.
- Software-defined infrastructure: Cloud is software defined, so it can be dynamically configured without customers having to manage hardware placement or cope with administrative toil. From a security standpoint, that means specifying security policies as code, and continuously monitoring their effectiveness.
- Increasing deployment velocity: Because of cloud’s vast scale, providers have had to automate software deployments and updates, usually with automated continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) systems. That same automation delivers security enhancements, resulting in more frequent security updates.
- Simplicity: Cloud becomes an abstraction-generating machine for identifying, creating and deploying simpler default modes of operating securely and autonomically.
- Sovereignty meets sustainability: The cloud’s global scale and ability to operate in localized and distributed ways creates three pillars of sovereignty. This global scale can also be leveraged to improve energy efficiency.
If you’re an IT decision maker, pay attention to these megatrends that will continue to drive and reinforce cloud security and will outpace the security of on-prem infrastructure well into the future.
U.S. Federal government cybersecurity momentum
- Open source software security: Earlier this month, Google participated in the White House Summit on open source software security. The meeting came at a critical time for the industry following December’s Log4j vulnerabilities and was both a recognition of the challenge and an important first step towards addressing it. The open source software ecosystem is not homogenous, despite the fact that the industry often thinks of or treats it this way. Some of it, like Linux, is highly curated, while other critical software is supported through diffuse communities including technology companies and other stakeholders. There is also a long tail of many other critical projects driven by a dedicated community of maintainers around the world, including Googlers. In light of this reality, we welcomed the chance to share our recommendations to advance the future of open source software security. Some work we’ve done includes founding the Open Source Security Foundation, which has been instrumental already in making security improvements. We’ve also helped drive a number of key security initiatives within the open source community including security scorecards, the SLSA framework to improve the security and integrity of open source packages, and Secure Open Source Rewards to financially incentivize improvements to critical open source security projects.
- OMB’s Federal zero trust strategy: The publication of the Office of Management and Budget’s zero trust architecture strategy marks an important step for the U.S. federal government’s efforts to modernize under Executive Order 14028. Google Cloud supports this approach, which recognizes the immense security benefits offered by modern computing architectures. For the past decade, Google has successfully applied zero trust principles through our BeyondCorp and BeyondProd frameworks for providing end-user access and securing our cloud workloads. And we’ve brought these best practices from our own journey to global governments and businesses of any size through solutions like BeyondCorp Enterprise and capabilities like Binary Authorization and Anthos Service Mesh, which are embedded in Anthos, our managed application platform. For Federal agencies embarking on this zero trust journey, the Google Cybersecurity Action Team will offer our expertise by conducting Zero Trust Foundations strategy workshops, which can help organizations in the public and private sectors develop actionable and achievable strategies and plans for zero trust implementation.
Google Cybersecurity Action Team Highlights
Here are the latest updates, products, services and resources across our security teams this month:
Security
- Democratizing security operations: We recently announced that Siemplify, a leading security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) provider, is joining Google Cloud to help companies better manage their threat response. Providing a proven SOAR capability with Chronicle’s approach to security analytics is an important step forward in our vision to advance invisible security and democratize security operations for every organization.
- Security by design: The Highmark Health security team is using “secure-by-design” techniques to address the security, privacy, and compliance aspects of its Living Health solution with Google Cloud’s Professional Services Organization (PSO). Google has long advocated for and followed security by design principles, which is why we’re continuously building enhanced security, controls, resiliency and more into our cloud products and services.
- Secure collaboration for hybrid work environments: The Google Workspace team shared its recommendations for businesses as they prepare for the future of work, where the hybrid/flexible work model is becoming standard practice and a new approach to security is essential.
- Anthos Policy Controller CIS Benchmark enforcement: A big part of our shared fate philosophy is to build secure products and not just security products. A recent example of this in action is embedding CIS benchmark policy conformance in the Anthos Policy Controller. We believe the more we embed approaches like this into our products, the more application and infrastructure teams can intrinsically embed security at the start and reduce toil for the security team.
- DevOps for technology-driven organizations and startups: A key success factor for many security programs is the partnership and integration with development teams, and there are some great resources and lessons in our DORA research.
- Security by design with Chrome OS: ABN AMRO’s Asia-Pacific region team recently shared how they are using Chrome OS and CloudReady to work securely in the cloud, reduce total cost of ownership, and add flexibility for employees. This is a great example of secure by design principles in the use of Chromium.
Risk & Compliance
- Boards of Directors summary guide to cloud risk governance: The latest whitepaper from the Google Cybersecurity Action Team outlines how boards of directors can prioritize safe, secure, and compliant adoption processes for cloud technologies within their organizations.
- TruSight Risk Assessment of Google Cloud: TruSight recently released a comprehensive
risk assessment report on Google Cloud. Our Enterprise Trust team collaborated on this robust assessment of Google Cloud services to validate the design and implementation of controls. TruSight’s risk assessment of our security controls will help customers accelerate and complete their risk management due diligence. - Data governance: Check out this new blog series on data governance where our teams explain the role of data governance, its importance, and the necessary processes to run an effective data governance program. Implementing data governance will help maximize value derived from business data, build user trust, and ensure compliance with required security measures.
Controls and Products
- Encrypting Data Fusion: To help meet the security, privacy and compliance requirements of customers in regulated industries like finance or public sector, we announced the general availability of Customer Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK) integration for Cloud Data Fusion, which enables encryption of both user data and metadata at rest with a key that customers can control through our Cloud Key Management Service (KMS).
Don’t forget to sign-up for our newsletter if you’d like to have our Cloud CISO Perspectives post delivered every month to your inbox. We’ll be back next month with more updates and security-related news.
Protect Users in Apps with Multi-Factor Authentication
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These days, using a password alone to secure user accounts containing sensitive, identifiable, or private information just isn’t sufficient. Passwords are often subject to reuse and can easily be phished and stolen.
With this in mind, we recently teamed up with researchers from New York University and the University of California, San Diego to find out just how effective basic account hygiene is at preventing account takeovers. The research showed that simply adding a SMS as a second factor to a Google account can block up to 100% of automated bots, 96% of bulk phishing attacks, and 76% of targeted attacks that occurred during our investigation.
To help you enhance the security of your apps and protect your users, Identity Platform now supports multi-factor authentication (MFA) with SMS in beta.
You can now configure Identity Platform to require users who attempt to login to your application to self-enroll in MFA—also known as two-factor authentication (2FA)—and register a device that is capable of receiving SMS messages. When users attempt to sign-in to your app with their first-factor credential (email/password, social login, SAML, OIDC), Identity Platform will require them to enter the six-digit authentication code that it sends via SMS to their registered devices before they can sign-in to your apps and services.
Getting started
You can learn more about this new feature by checking out the documentation page. To get started with Identity Platform, enable it in GCP Marketplace, watch our Cloud Next ‘19 presentation, and read the quickstart.
Ubuntu Pro Images Now Available on Google Cloud
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Today, we’re pleased to announce the general availability of Ubuntu Pro images on Google Cloud, providing customers with an improved Ubuntu experience, expanded security coverage, and integration with critical Google Cloud features. In partnership with Canonical, we’re making it even easier for customers that have fully embraced open source to ensure security and compliance for their most mission-critical and enterprise workloads.
With Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud, you now have access to features like:
- 10-year lifetime security updates – Canonical backs Ubuntu Pro for 10 years with security updates and a guaranteed upgrade path.
- FIPS & CC-EAL2 certification – Ubuntu Pro includes components that meet requirements from entities like FedRAMP, HIPAA, ISO, and PCI.
- Open-source security coverage – Protect your most important open-source workloads including MongoDB, Apache Kafka, Redis, NGINX, and PostgreSQL.
- Multi-version availability – Pro images are available for the three most popular Ubuntu Server distributions: 16.04 LTS, 18.04 LTS, and 20.04 LTS.
- Kernel Livepatch – Kernel patches are delivered immediately without having to reboot your VMs.
- Optional CIS and DISA STIG profiles – Choose from two leading profiles to harden your environment according to industry benchmarks.
- Cloud-based pricing – Ubuntu Pro does not require a contract, and pricing tracks with the underlying compute cost depending on the instance type.
Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with Ubuntu Pro
Availability of Ubuntu Pro images is especially important if you’re an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS customer and want extended security maintenance (ESM) for your virtual machines but don’t want to upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS or Ubuntu 20.04 LTS versions immediately. ESM is included with Ubuntu Pro 16.04. You can move your workloads from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS VM instances to Ubuntu Pro 16.04 instances to continue receiving ESM and all the above-mentioned benefits, without having to test your applications on a new version of the OS.
Gojek has evolved from offering just ride-hailing to a suite of more than 20 services today, serving everyday solutions for millions of users across Southeast Asia.
“We needed more time to comprehensively test and migrate our Ubuntu 16.04 LTS workloads to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, which would mean stretching beyond the standard maintenance timelines for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. With Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud, we now have the ability to postpone this, and in moving our 16.04 workloads to Ubuntu Pro, we benefit from its live kernel patching and improved security coverage for our key open source components.”—Kartik Gupta, Engineering Manager for CI/CD & FinOps at Gojek
“With the launch of Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud, we build on our joint investments with Google to optimize Ubuntu performance on Google Cloud, and add comprehensive security patching and Long Term Support for another 30,000 open source packages—the widest range of security-maintained open source on the planet,” said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical. “As the world moves to open source for everything, Canonical offers the safety net of security maintenance that enterprises count on to unleash their developers.”
Getting started
Getting started with Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud is simple. You can now purchase these premium images directly from Google Cloud by selecting Ubuntu Pro as the operating system straight from the Google Cloud Console.
To learn more about Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud, please visit the documentation page and read the announcement from Canonical.
Latest Enhancements in reCAPTCHA Enterprise Helps Govts Sites Protect against Digital Frauds
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Download our guidebook to learn how reCAPTCHA Enterprise can help strengthen your website security quickly.
Cyber threats on the rise
In 2021, the United States saw 40.5% of website attacks committed through “bad bots” on the internet, with 37.2% of government website traffic being bad bots, according to research by cybersecurity firm Imperva1. As cyber threats increase, government agencies need a way to safely let constituents access digital services. Google Cloud reCAPTCHA Enterprise protects websites by distinguishing between humans and bots. Full-scale implementation of reCAPTCHA Enterprise solution expands on bot detection to protect public sector websites from a broad range of digital fraud. Below are some highlights from our new reCAPTCHA Enterprise guidebook detailing functional enhancements and ways for government agencies to take advantage of enterprise capabilities.
Advanced website protection
reCAPTCHA Enterprise builds upon the existing reCAPTCHA API that has defended 5+ million websites for over a decade. It uses advanced risk analysis techniques to distinguish between humans and bots, protecting sites from spam and abuse as well as detecting other fraudulent activities, including credential stuffing, account takeovers (ATO), and automated account creation.
How it works
Detecting password leaks and credential breaches
With reCAPTCHA Enterprise’s password leak protection, agencies can conduct regular audits of user credentials, such as passwords, to detect leaks and breaches and prevent account takeovers (ATOs), as well as credential stuffing attacks.
UI challenge vs. frictionless
reCAPTCHA Enterprise returns a score, giving you the ability to take a number of actions, including requiring additional factors of authentication or throttling bots that may be scraping content. This functionality allows you to verify if an interaction is legitimate without any user interaction.
User-friendly migration
Google Cloud’s reCAPTCHA Enterprise offers a simple migration process in which your account is moved from the reCAPTCHA Admin to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) after you create a project to migrate it to. Watch our 10-minute webinar to see how.
A cost-effective upgrade to a standard cybersecurity solution
Google reCAPTCHA Enterprise comes with 99.9%+ uptime, multi-factor authentication, and support for Android, iOS, and web applications. Our reCAPTCHA offering is structured in a way that allows you to fully control your investment and responsibly allocate taxpayer dollars.
reCAPTCHA Enterprise in action
Google Cloud’s reCAPTCHA protects against key automated attacks, including account creation, credential stuffing, cashing out, denial of inventory, and skewing. State governments have found success with using Google Cloud’s reCAPTCHA for cyber risk management. Wisconsin’s Workforce Development Agency used fraud detection and identification, including reCAPTCHA, to mitigate malicious bot logins on its external website, and several agencies in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania have implemented reCAPTCHA to prevent bots from booking and reselling COVID-19 vaccine appointments.
Protecting public sector websites from bad actors can be challenging, especially with emerging threats from adversaries and extremist groups. Google Cloud’s reCAPTCHA Enterprise offers comprehensive website security solutions to successfully protect against cyber threats.
Download our reCAPTCHA Enterprise guidebook for a detailed look at how you can use reCAPTCHA Enterprise to strengthen your website security and implement the solution quickly and easily.
References:
Defining cloud’s future: How autonomic data security can help
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“Ninety percent of all data today was created in the last two years—that’s 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day,” according to business data analytics company Domo. That would be a mind-bending statistic, except that it’s already five years old.
As data usage has undergone drastic expansion and changes in the past five years, so have your business needs for data. Technology such as cloud computing and AI have changed how we use data, derive value from data, and glean insights from data. Your organization is no longer just crunching and re-crunching the same data sets. Data moves, shifts, and replicates, as you mingle data sets and gain new value in the process, as we say in our Data Cloud story. All the while, your data resides in—and is being created in—new places.
Data lives in a myriad of locations now and requires access from different locations and mediums, yet many of today’s security models are not geared towards this. In short, your data has fallen out of love with your security model, but attackers have not. So, how do we realign data and security so they are once again in a healthy relationship?
Google Cloud, as a leader in cloud data management and cloud security, is positioned uniquely to define and lead this effort. We’ve identified some challenges around the classic approach to data security and the changes triggered by the near-ubiquity of the cloud. The case is compelling for adopting a modern approach to data security. We contend that the optimal way forward is with autonomic data security.
A relatively new concept, autonomic data security is security that’s been integrated with data throughout its lifecycle. It can make things easier on users by freeing them from defining and redefining myriad rules about who can do what, when, where. It’s an approach that keeps pace with constantly evolving cyberthreats and business changes.
Autonomic data security can help you keep your IT assets more secure and can make your business and IT processes speedier. For example, data sharing with partners and data access decisions simultaneously becomes faster and more secure. This may sound like magic, but in fact relies on a constant willingness to change and adapt to both business changes and threat evolution.
Taking the precepts, concepts, and forward-looking solutions presented in this paper into consideration, we strongly believe that now is the right time to assess where you and your business are when it comes to data security. Cloud also brings an incredible scale of computing. Where gigabytes once roamed, petabytes are now common. This means that many data security approaches, especially the manual ones, are no longer practical.
To prepare for the future of data security, we recommend you challenge your current model and assumptions and ask critical questions, evaluate where you are, and then start to put a plan in place of how you could start incorporating the autonomic data security pillars into your data security model.
There are two sets of questions organizations need to discover the answers to as they start this journey. The first set of questions will help you identify the nature and status of your data, and inform the answers to the second set.
- What data do I have?
- Who owns it?
- Is it sensitive?
- How is it used?
- What is the value in storing the data?
The second set focuses on higher-level problems:
- What is my current approach to data security?
- Where does it fail to support the business and counter the threats?
- Does it support my business?
- Should I consider making a change? And if yes, in what direction?
The path to improved data security starts by asking the right questions. You can read the full Autonomic Data Security paper for a more in-depth exploration here and learn more about the idea in this podcast episode.
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