Predicting Where Your Data is Most Vulnerable

Identifying and prioritizing your highest-value/highest risk data allows you to secure it with surgical precision

The typical approach to data security – a “boil the ocean” approach – tends to treat your IT infrastructure as the actual target for bad actors. But cybercriminals aren’t interested in your infrastructure; they want your data… and targeting your infrastructure is just a means for getting closer to your data. And since perimeter defenses can be easily breached, today’s threats call for a different approach to data security.

A data-first security approach assumes that your data is the actual target of the attack. By addressing security at the storage layer – a category referred to as cyberstorage by Gartner – you can actually develop a heatmap of your data’s attack surface. For more than a decade now, Superna’s focus has been on providing security at the data layer. By focusing on the data layer, you’re better able to harden your attack surface and even predict vulnerabilities, allowing you to construct a targeted remediation plan that pinpoints those hosts and users that represent the weakest links in your infrastructure.

Your data is your cyber risk

Your data’s attack surface is defined as the sum of all storage locations, data types (structured, unstructured) and the users and hosts machines that have direct or indirect data access. If you look at your data, users, and hosts through the lens of data access patterns and data importance to the company, you end up with an appreciably smaller subset of the total data footprint that needs to be hardened against attacks. Superna is working on technology to dynamically compute your data’s attack surface, allowing you to precisely identify where best to apply hardening and remediation in your infrastructure, helping to reduce your data cyber risk.

Current approaches to security tend to take a “boil the ocean” approach, applying security controls across devices with little regard for the actual value of the data or the calculated risk to the company. By applying a data-driven, Machine Learning-enabled approach to security controls and your Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE), you can better prioritize the highest-risk data being accessed by high-risk hosts and active user accounts and tailor your remediation initiatives directly to them.

Not only are we able to predict the highest-priority vulnerabilities in the infrastructure, we can also provide insight as to why the risk is higher for a given host or user account. Of course, data access patterns and vulnerabilities change as your infrastructure changes. Some examples include when new hosts are added to the network; user data access permissions are changed; new applications are installed; firewall rules are changed; and new CVEs are published. The definition and scope of the attack surface is constantly changing, creating permutations that would prove difficult for manual processes to identify vulnerabilities, or predict a compromise before it occurs. By evaluating data and its importance to the enterprise, it’s easier to identify and secure, helping to ensure that your highest-value data receives the protection it needs.

Improving your cyber risk outcomes

We categorize this technology as an “active defense”, and it’s a key component of any next-generation cyberstorage platform. By combining “active defense” with “offensive security” as defined by the NIST 2.0 cyber security framework, you get a comprehensive, storage-layer security capability that provides far greater protection against cyberattacks, helping to minimize business disruption and improve outcomes.

Prevention is the New Recovery

For more than a decade, Superna has provided innovation and leadership in data security and cyberstorage solutions for unstructured data, both on-premise and in the hybrid cloud. Superna solutions are utilized by thousands of organizations globally, helping them to close the data security gap by providing automated, next-generation cyber defense at the data layer.

By focusing on data security at the core, Superna helps ensure that even if your endpoint defenses are compromised, critical data remains protected. This layered approach to data security helps organizations safeguard their most valuable asset – their data – against both cyberthreats and human error, for improved resilience and business continuity in a world that is increasingly reliant on data. And through robust integrations with industry-leading SIEM and SOAR tools, Superna allows you to monitor and manage your file and object data using the security tools you already have in place.

Superna is recognized by Gartner as a solution provider in the cyberstorage category. Superna… because prevention is the new recovery!