Superna Cybersecurity Blog

A New Approach to Data Protection

Andrew MacKay, CTO Superna
FEBRUARY 14, 2023

Today's Threat Landscape is Evolving

A new cyber attack takes place every 39 seconds, with 64% of companies worldwide having reported experiencing one form or another. The total cost of cyber attacks equated to $6 trillion in 2022, with expectations to rise to as much as $10.5 trillion annually by 2025.

As a result of the increasing sophistication of cyber-criminals, 100% prevention is no longer an achievable goal. Traditional protection and response functionality are no longer a sufficient defense against cyber threats. While individual solutions might minimize damage, a proactive approach helps ensure resiliency and recoverability. This is why businesses are benefitting from a Data First approach towards data protection and security.

The Status Quo

The increasing sophistication of cyber-criminals means 100% prevention is no longer an achievable goal
A prevalent strategy today revolves around implementing controls to identify when data is compromised and how to recover quickly from an attack. One such approach that is increasingly rising in popularity is endpoint protection. While this may seem like the ideal solution today, it brings its own set of drawbacks, including challenging implementations, interoperability issues, human resourcing requirements, and alert fatigue to name a few.

One of the greatest drawbacks may be that despite having endpoint protection in place, bad actors can successfully bypass these protections by compromising identity and access credentials, often through popular forms of attacks including phishing, business email compromise, and social engineering. Instead, a more effective approach to data protection would involve solutions that can detect when data access is abused.

Getting Ahead of Evolving Threats

Real-time analytics and advanced AI allow you to get ahead of threats
One of the most important things to consider when it comes to cybersecurity is that there is no "one-size fits all" solution. Instead, a better approach towards getting ahead of threats and proactively protecting data is by removing security control silos and adopting a holistic security approach.

For instance, ransomware is one of the most common types of attack today. While there are several solutions that can detect known ransomware variants or the active process of encrypting traffic, these activities performed by these solutions may result in overly strict measures and practices that unnecessarily disrupt business. A more proactive approach can not only prevent significant damage to your business, but does so without impacting day-to-day operations.

An alternative would be to develop processes that allow you to get ahead of threats and to build a technology stack that facilitates these processes. An example includes Vectra's Attack Signal Intelligence solution, which can automatically detect known and unknown threats in real-time, granting the ability to identify the early signs of ransomware prior to any data exfiltration or encryption. In conjunction with Superna's full visibility into the unstructured data footprint and the ability to snapshot file systems and object stores for placement in protective immutable states, users can now facilitate proactive data protection.

Time for a New Approach

This proactive approach results in preventing disruption to business continuity as well as the need for costly data recovery that would normally follow a ransomware attack.

For more thorough coverage of changes in the cybersecurity landscape and to learn about how your organization can pursue a Data First approach, download our white paper, Evolving from Data Protection to Data Security.

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