In today’s digital age, the proliferation of data and the advent of sophisticated analytics have transformed how organizations operate. The Modern Data Stack, which includes powerful tools and platforms for data storage, processing, and analytics, plays a crucial role in harnessing data to drive business value. However, the openness and the “build your own data stack” approach of the Modern Data Stack has a downside: it is easy to build and deploy to production quickly while neglecting security.
Once you have many different tools for every use case in your company, you’ll find that there’s no easy way to apply homogeneous policies across your entire stack. Some components have certain features, but others do not. Some components might not have any security at all. It’s a nightmare for security and compliance teams, who might feel like they are working on an impossible task when securing the data.
The recent attack suffered by Snowflake users makes it blatantly clear that security must be treated far more seriously, and options that could secure our data should not be neglected or treated like a nice feature ‘just for the future’.
So let’s explore some of the most relevant challenges when trying to secure data on a Modern Data Stack.
Data Breaches
Data breaches can expose sensitive customer information, intellectual property, and proprietary business data, leading to financial loss, legal consequences, and reputation damage. This can happen through internal breaches, or through external breaches perpetrated by outsourced valid users, or other external intrusions.
Access Control
Ensuring that only authorized personnel can access sensitive data is critical. Improper access controls can result in unauthorized data access and misuse. Typical cases are internal employees looking at data unintended for them, like salaries, customers data, or financial numbers. The worst case is when those employees are able to copy or export sensetive data.
Data Encryption
Data needs to be encrypted both at rest and in transit to prevent interception and unauthorized access. If possible, encryption keys should be owned by the customer, to avoid unauthorized access by another customer that could abuse data that shares the same keys.
Compliance
Meeting regulatory requirements (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA) is essential for protecting sensitive information and avoiding hefty fines. Restricting the compliance surface is a common approach, as usually not all the data in the company requires the same level of security.
Data Governance
Proper data governance ensures data integrity, accuracy, and consistency. It also involves tracking data lineage and maintaining audit trails. This usually requires proper technology, specific specialists and changes in business processes.
Given the mentioned challenges, there are a few steps that companies can leverage to make their data far more secure.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
This is a must nowadays. MFA requires users to provide two or more verification factors to access their accounts, significantly reducing the risk of unauthorized access. This also prevents data leaks due to users publishing their own credentials, something far more common than expected.
Data Masking
This is a technology capable of registering and masking sensitive data on the fly, right before the user sees it. This enables organizations to mask sensitive data, limit the amount of data consumed, and detect internal fraud. This ensures that sensitive information is hidden from unauthorized users while still allowing valid access to non-sensitive data.
Logging and Auditing
Some tools allow detailed tracking of what the users do, enabling organizations to audit data usage and comply with regulatory requirements.
Having experts in data security can reduce liabilities, fines, and credibility loss, that could affect companies far more than expected. The BlueYeti Modern Data Stack Center of Excellence has security at the center of all data considerations because we know that insecure data environments don’t drive business outcomes, they put the entire enterprise at risk. Rest assured where our employees are involved, we will apply the best practices in data security.
