Because of the growing complexities of enterprise IT infrastructure, the concept of “data fabric” has been attracting attention in recent years. As organizations expand and work with more information from growing numbers of sources, they need more efficient ways to access and manage their data in a secure manner. This reality is reflected by the significant growth of the data fabric solutions market.
Essentially, data fabric is an approach to managing and integrating data, aimed at enabling access to information across the enterprise in a versatile, iterable, and augmented way. It addresses the difficulties encountered by many organizations in gathering, linking, consolidating, and delivering information to users from disjointed sources.
However, data fabric is not just about enabling access. As a concept, it can also serve as a model for enhanced security governance. It can guide the orchestration of security solutions to maximize cyber defenses through improved governance.
The Data Fabric and Cybersecurity Connection
The data fabric concept can translate into an architecture that creates an end-to-end integration of various data pipelines, including data from cloud environments. Thus, a data fabric architecture exists when there is comprehensive consolidation of all data in an organization, which ensures efficient but secure access to data. This usually entails the unification of IT governance, data systems, as well as security and privacy controls.
Organizations benefit from data fabric architecture because it is designed to be open for a wide range of integration. It supports extensive scalability because it ensures that data from any storage location or operating system can be consolidated frictionlessly. It ensures that team members and services can access the data they need in real-time to support dynamic analysis, financial strategy models, optimization initiatives, marketing campaigns, and any number of other activities.
So how is data fabric related to cybersecurity in the context of data fabric architecture? The relationship is demonstrated by the idea of a data security fabric. Under this concept, cybersecurity and data fabric merge to create a data protection solution that provides comprehensive coverage, capable of protecting all types of data, regardless of the source.
A data security fabric ensures that information is protected in view not only of the changing threat landscape but also with respect to the new realities of IT deployments at present. Enterprises are now using multi-cloud and hybrid environments that entail new challenges in terms of visibility, management, and security. As such, enterprises need a model that can scale with the changes in their infrastructure. They need enhanced controls and monitoring capabilities over their data. Additionally, they need an approach that is in line with regulatory requirements.
Centralized Security Visibility and Scalability
One of the key challenges in modern IT is the expansiveness and complexity of enterprise infrastructure, which make it difficult to proactively manage all data. This is particularly true for organizations that operate in multiple geographical locations. They inevitably employ multiple storage locations, databases, and potentially different policies for data management and security.
Without a sensible approach to security visibility, it will be difficult to keep everything in order. The data fabric model provides a way to harmonize the differences brought about by the multitude of components and policies. It addresses the risks of developing data and application silos, which make security solutions less effective and worsen vulnerabilities and the proneness of attacks.
What makes the data fabric model so potent in this context is that it can be applied to small operating units or subsidiaries first for a more manageable implementation. The different implementations can then be expanded to consolidate all data security controls harmoniously.
This flexibility and scalability allow organizations to test out the model first, until they can get the hang of it and apply it to the entire enterprise infrastructure.
Improved Protection and Security Policy Enforcement
Data fabric architecture is also a boon to security governance because of the enhanced controls it enables. It provides wide-ranging protection, the integration of different technologies, and security automation.
A focus on data security fabric makes it easier to protect data across different platforms or environments, including hybrid setups and on-premise storage. Governance solutions can seamlessly interoperate with different cloud providers. They can also secure structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. In a way, they provide a framework for security standardization across different environments while providing the ability to centrally manage data assets.
Integration is a key benefit of the data fabric architecture, and this significantly bolsters security governance by bringing together different data ecosystems to make them easier to manage. By integrating existing security and data ecosystems, organizations can correlate security information to aid the detection of anomalous activities, privilege escalation attempts, data exfiltration attacks, and other security issues. Consolidating security information helps minimize threat detection false positives, reduce security notification noise, and facilitate the prioritization of more critical threats.
Moreover, data fabric security is compatible with security automation. It supports the automated discovery of ungoverned data assets while enabling the continuous monitoring of data-related activities to detect and address anomalies and potentially harmful actions. Data fabric security solutions are designed to ensure uninterrupted threat activity analysis while taking away the need for inefficient and costly manual actions.
Compliance Made Easy
Data fabric architecture is designed to help enterprises ensure compliance with regulations on data handling and security. Organizations that adopt this architecture will automatically follow a data management approach that emphasizes centralized management, extensive security visibility, security policy enforcement, granular access control, and auditability.
These attributes conform with the foundational goals of almost all data privacy and security regulations, which require organizations to ensure that they have full oversight over their data, the ability to implement all applicable security policies, and the means for efficient data forensics in cases of data breaches.
While cybersecurity pundits often argue that security regulation compliance does not equate with real security, it makes sense to acknowledge that security laws or regulations provide a good security benchmark. Compliance serves as a good first line of defense, especially for organizations with little experience and proficiency in data security.
Data fabric security does not automatically mean compliance with all data regulations, though. It is an excellent starting point for ensuring compliance. It makes it easier to observe best practices and keep up with updates in regulations.
Conclusion
Data fabric is not just some arbitrary buzzword that is set to fade into oblivion as new trends emerge. Its core concept captures the need to harmoniously bring together new data technologies and security approaches, something that is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. The data fabric architecture indubitably augments security governance as enterprises deal with ever-increasing data infrastructure components, data ecosystems, and regulations.
The post How Data Fabric Architecture Helps Enhance Security Governance appeared first on Cybersecurity Insiders.
May 09, 2024 at 07:34PM
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