Organizations today store sensitive customer, product, and other business-critical enterprise data across an increasing number and variety of platforms and physical locations, shared via webs of APIs, and duplicated into data silos for analytics.

75% of total cyberattacks in the financial services industry were targeted on APIs.

In these dynamic environments, you need metadata-driven intelligence and automation to ensure sustained data protection and privacy compliance, with the ability to answer questions such as the following:

• Which types of data are considered sensitive?
• Where is sensitive data located?
• Who is accessing data?
• Does current access and use comply with privacy regulations and data use policies?
• Is data protection appropriate and is data risk at acceptable levels?

Organizations based their defenses on traditional network and host-based controls like perimeter firewalls and anti-virus software, but IT security practices are in the midst of a major transition.

The Shift to Data-Centric Security

Data-centric security prioritizes securing data where it’s stored and processed, instead of focusing on security controls for hardware and network infrastructure. In a data-centric security framework, security policies and protocols are defined and enforced at the data layer, rather than deferred to a server, application, or network.

This way, data will remain protected as it moves in and out of storage systems or applications as well as changing business contexts, regardless of the network or application security.

By implementing Data-centric security, you can simplify and automate data governance and security for data sets, reaping benefits like:

• Data is protected, as it is shared and used across contexts, domains, users, and networks – identity and access policies work consistently throughout data lifecycle.
• Security logic is embedded and implemented across all sources (apps, data lakes, middleware, APIs) with no rework required.
• Achieve compliance and align security and governance practices with changing business contexts
• Developers and testers can focus on building great applications and APIs without being responsible for security or governance

Validata ConnectIQ is built on a data-centric architecture that brings security into the data tier, by adding an integrated, data-centric layer of security controls for all sensitive data sources.

Through automation it takes user errors out of the equation, and allows developers and testers to do their jobs without interruption and without jeopardizing the company’s data.

Organizations can improve their data risk exposure to help reduce the impact of data security breaches and internal misuse, and be compliant with regional and industry privacy regulations.