Top 5 Benefits of Cloud Data Protection Platform

Making money is the ultimate goal of any corporation but not losing money is just as important. According to IBM, the average cost of a data breach is $4.24M, a substantial impact on your bottom line. And according to Gartner, by 2025, 60% of organizations will use cybersecurity risk assessment as the primary factor in choosing business partners. You cannot go any further without adequate cybersecurity solutions.

Gartner also predicts that by the end of 2023, modern privacy laws will protect 75% of the world’s population. If you have any personal data stored, you must comply with GDPR, LGPD, and CCPA. To remain compliant over several jurisdictions, you will need to maintain a high level of data protection.

Barring a large team of security experts, you will need a third-party platform to effectively manage and maintain your data security and compliance. Cloud data protection platforms are one tool you can, and should, employ to achieve this.

What is a cloud data protection platform?

Cloud data protection platforms are tools enabling monitoring, protecting, and analysis of vulnerabilities across all the organizations’ data stores, regardless of their state of motion. A centralized solution offers the benefit of securing data across multiple cloud platforms without knowing the physical location of the data.

Most cloud database solutions function under a shared responsibility model; this means that some aspects of data protection are the service provider’s responsibility while others are your responsibility. Many organizations neglect their side of the shared responsibility model. A cloud data protection platform is the best solution for taking responsibility for your data.

5 Benefits of a Cloud Data Protection Platform

1. Proactively identify and mitigate risks

The earlier you find security vulnerabilities, the less likely you will experience a data leak. Your top priority should be proactively identifying and mitigating risk, and cloud data protection platforms provide you with the necessary tools.

The first priority is figuring out the type of data you’re storing. Losing personal data such as identity, credit card numbers, and addresses has a much higher risk factor than usernames and passwords.

Data security platforms help you analyze the severity of the risk and prioritize securing the data with the highest potential for damage, should it leak.

You may have Shadow Data that you’re entirely unaware of, which is a security vulnerability that you should not ignore. Identifying where all your data is and how you can access it is part of identifying and mitigating risks to your data.

2. Visualize compliance

Compliance generates trust, and trust is invaluable. Cloud data protection platforms can help you visualize the current state of your compliance with all significant legislation and certificates such as GDPR, CCPA, PCI, PII, and HIPPA. Continuous oversight of compliance is challenging without a system that can continuously monitor and log the state of your security policies.

GDPR, for example, rests on two core concepts:

Data protection by design means you implement security measures from the early stages of any project storing personal information.
Data protection by default means that you do not gather unnecessary data about users unless they opt-in by choice.

While the latter is a simple design choice, the former is something you might need help implementing. Choosing the correct platform for your data protection as early as possible is crucial to maintaining compliance with GDPR.

If you leave the knowledge about your compliance in the shadows for periodic audits, you may find that the cost in resources and time will be a burden. By getting continuous insights regarding the state of your compliance, you can allocate resources without interrupting your day-to-day operations.

A data protection platform will alert you to any changes, and a robust and user-friendly dashboard will highlight any potential issues with compliance.

3. Data security

Naturally, you’re looking to secure your data. A cloud data protection platform keeps your data secure from creation to destruction while in rest or motion. Backups, encryption, 2-factor authentication, and robust security policies prevent data leaks, data corruption, or data loss. Your data is invaluable, and protecting it is of the utmost importance.

There are many ways to protect your data, but a centralized solution is often the best choice. When you can change security policy on the go to protect your data from upcoming changes in one place, it is far less likely that you will overlook any potential weak points.

4. High availability and support

When using a third-party platform for your cloud security, you can typically rely on timely support that will help prevent significant malfunctions. Choosing a platform that provides round-the-clock support is crucial for maintaining a high level of reliability and security.

Furthermore, cloud data protection platforms should have many layers of redundancy to fall back on in failure. This multi-level redundancy is not something the average organization can build up for itself. A third-party platform is often the way to go.

Polar detects shadow data and sensitive data flows for Ocrolus

Case Study

See how Ocrolus discovered 1,389 shadow data stores within its cloud environment in less than 5 minutes

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5. Visibility into cloud data

Before the advent of cloud computing, organizations stored their data on-premise. DevOps had physical access to the data and the server architecture, making it easy to control the flow and security of data. These days, developers can create and manage data on the fly, spreading data across multiple microservices and platforms.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers hide the inner workings of their servers from the customer. As a consumer of their services, you have no control over the location of the data or how it is handled. With Platform and Software as a service (PaaS and Saas) the issues arising from lack of visibility are more severe.

Cloud data protection platforms provide the clarity you cannot get from the service providers. If you aren’t aware of every bit of data you have in the cloud, it is impossible to protect it. For cloud security to perform, it must have a broad reach. Cloud data protection platforms can find and visualize all your data and then defend it.

Manage and protect your data with Polar

You must protect your data to save yourself from the potential costs of a data leak and to comply with modern legislation. Polar’s security platform encompasses the critical necessities of modern cloud data protection with an automated and complete data management and protection solution.

Polar’s approach to data protection is to follow the data and uncover all of it over any regions, cloud accounts, subnets, and anywhere else. Once you have found all your data, the next objective is to identify or assign custody of the various data stores to users, applications, or services.

An automated approach to data labeling eliminates the need to monitor and classify your data and any associated risks manually. You can analyze the data flow to know where the data goes and through which channels and protect it with the relevant security policies.

‍Protect your data with Polar, an unintrusive, agentless, read-only solution to all your data protection needs.