Data Security Governance is essential for managing and protecting sensitive data as hybrid and cloud environments grow increasingly complex. According to a recent Identity Theft Resource report, 80% of enterprises have experienced some sort of incident involving unauthorized data access. Â
When you combine the statistics with ongoing and evolving regulations, including GDPR requirements and new AI-related data regulations, automated data governance tools are becoming a must-have for avoiding fines and costly data breaches.
What is Data Security Governance?Â
Data Security Governance (DSG) refers to the comprehensive framework of policies, procedures, and technologies that ensure the protection, integrity, and confidentiality of an organization’s sensitive data. DSG goes beyond simply managing who has access to what data; it addresses the broader need to protect data from both internal and external threats throughout its lifecycle. Â
When DSG is done right, it helps organizations remain compliant with regulations, reduce risks, and maintain the trust of customers and stakeholders.
What is the difference between Data Security Governance and Data Access Governance?
Data Security Governance (DSG) and Data Access Governance (DAG) are often mentioned together and may be perceived as interchangeable, but it’s important to understand how they differ in the data management framework.
Data Access Governance (DAG) focuses on managing who has access to what data and enforces policies that ensure only authorized users can access sensitive information. Think permissions, roles, and managing user access to mitigate risk of data misuse.
Data Security Governance (DSG), on the other hand, encompasses broader policies and practices aimed at protecting data itself. DSG includes access management but also covers encryption, risk management, data integrity, monitoring for threats, and complying with diverse regulatory frameworks. DSG ensures that data remains secure throughout its lifecycle, regardless of where it is stored or accessed.
Look at it this way: DAG is a subset of DSG—while DAG is about managing access, DSG is about the comprehensive security and protection of data.
How does data security governance work?
The first step in the DSG process is identifying and classifying the data, which encompasses comprehensive data discovery, categorization, and risk assessment.
Next, and perhaps the most important step, is to remediate any risk to the data.
Data security governance allows organizations to meet regulatory mandates for information barriers, protect data integrity, and establish zero trust security controls to prevent customer data loss.
With robust data security governance, organizations should be able to answer these questions:
- Where is my business-critical content?Â
- Is my sensitive data being shared only with those who are authorized to see it?Â
- Has data been shared or accessed inappropriately?Â
- How is my data protected from potential threats, both internal and external?Â
What are the benefits of data security governance?
If there’s one universal benefit of data security governance, it’s this: it enables organizations to maintain data security by controlling, protecting, and monitoring their data throughout its lifecycle.
More specifically, here’s a closer look at three key benefits of DSG:
Stronger regulatory compliance: As the remote and hybrid work model continues to dominate how employees work and promote more data-driven operations, compliance regulations become more crucial. With data security governance, organizations can improve security and compliance while limiting their risk of regulatory fines.
Better risk management: With robust data security governance, IT and security teams can gain the confidence that goes along with knowing that:
- Sensitive data is not exposed to employees, systems, or third parties that lack proper authorization.Â
- Data is protected from external malicious actors, significantly reducing the risk of security breaches.Â
- Insiders are prevented from accessing data they are not authorized to see, reducing the risk of misuse.Â
Comprehensive data protection: Strong data security governance allows users and employees to get access to more relevant data, while also making sure that all data interactions are protected. Data security governance ensures that sensitive data is properly encrypted, monitored, and protected against evolving threats, which ultimately has a positive impact on organizations.
How does Concentric AI help with data security governance?
Concentric AI’s easy-to-deploy SaaS security solution provides organizations with agentless connectivity to a wide variety of data repositories so you can secure and govern your data — wherever it resides… on premises, in the cloud, structured or unstructured.
Powerful deep learning technology improves data security and governance by giving you an unparalleled contextual understanding of your structured and unstructured data. The solution can help enterprises remediate data vulnerability issues, meet security and activity governance regulations, demonstrate control to auditors, and implement zero-trust security practices—all without complex rules or relying on end-users.
The advanced deep learning capabilities go beyond rules, pattern matching, or folder-based controls to protect against careless sharing, compromised users, or insider threats.
Our solution improves data security governance across all your data stores by connecting to on-premises unstructured data storage, structured databases, and messaging and email applications. This means the solution can discover, categorize, and monitor data wherever it is stored (and sprawled).
How does Concentric AI’s solution work?
Concentric AI’s Semantic Intelligence solution uses sophisticated machine learning technologies to autonomously scan and categorize data. Our deep learning-as-a-service capability means you will always have the latest AI models for fast, accurate discovery and categorization.
With Risk Distanceâ„¢ analysis, you can easily identify any sharing of sensitive data with unauthorized internal or third parties via email, file sharing applications, or collaboration applications. Email and other collaboration applications are scanned for sensitive data as well as links to protected information.
Our easy to use and autonomous remediation fixes access issues and reduces odds of a governance violation.
Why not give Concentric AI a try using your own data?
Contact us today to see firsthand how data security governance can be easily deployed in your organization.