Data Lakes in the Cloud have taken centre stage as data processors are putting massive datasets into AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform and similar. How companies govern an ever-expanding universe of sensitive information is a matter or customer, practitioner and regulatory concern.
Guest profile
This week we spend time with Ramses Gallegos who is currently the International Chief Technology Officer, Cybersecurity at Micro Focus. Ramses is a prominent speaker on the international circuit and a respected technology strategist and information security evangelist.
Axzel:
We're personally worried that some vendors are selling us dreams when it comes to managing data in the cloud. Having worked with numerous vendors yourself how would you respond to this?
Ramses:
It is imperative that we understand the data lifecycle, especially as we are at the centre of the Cloud Generation, where network perimeters have vanished and information lives in and travels into and out of the cloud.
It is fundamental that we ask the right questions to the right people at the right times when it comes to data governance; instrumental questions such as who has access to what, for how long, from where, who approved the access, to do what; are all critical to be able to afford data and data owners the protection they deserves.
Is it easy? No, I give you that. But is it possible? Absolutely. The key thing here is to embrace the mindset of protecting data independent of where it lives. Truly embedded continuous protection for data, in every Cloud instance.
Technology is super capable of enabling this and while different CSPs (Cloud Service Providers) may have different approaches to protection; the data owner can deploy technical and organizational measures and controls for data to be safeguarded.
Data Governance can and should be unified and simplified in its approach. While customers might find resistance from some CSPs about embedding their minimum security controls and countermeasures to avoid data breaches; it’s important to remind everyone that accountability will ALWAYS lie with the data owner.
There may be mitigation strategies put in place by the service providers but it remains the organisation’s mandate to protect its customer’s and workforce’s data.
One of the beauties of technology is that now one can have a data lake (massive amounts of information) in a Cloud and still implement encryption, tokenization, data scrambling, data hiding, data masking, anonymization at scale.
Granted technology is one part of the equation, but for this Cloud Generation, one fundamental pillar is to always have full oversight of data and to insist on the unconditional protection of data.