Overcoming the Challenge of Business Data Safety

Aram Jivanyan, CEO & Co-founder, BeSafeEvery week we hear about the next high profile data hack. And breach after breach, we see that corporate perimeter security fails to prevent business data leaks. Cloud migration in turn brings a whole new set of security challenges, as companies are fully taking their proprietary, sensitive data outside of their existing on premise security controls. The traditional approaches to security become less effective and we should accept there is no way to make the network systems, user computers or the cloud services totally safe. For this reason, the companies are shifting focus from protecting the borders towards a security model which aims to protect data at its core no matter where the data resides today or will travel tomorrow.With data-centric security the protection and access rights will travel with the data keeping it safe at rest, in transit and in use. Let’s see why the client side data-centric encryption should take the center stage as the answer to the urgent new questions about how to make corporate business data safe. The value of data-centric encryption:1.  Protect Your Data from HackersAlthough the level of security offered by most cloud services is high, it is still no match for hackers. For example, the recent hack of Dropbox resulted to the leakage of 68 million Dropbox user credentials. The 2015 hack of Slack enabled hackers to peruse the Slack database for several days.  Encrypting your data on a device before uploading it to the cloud removes the value that hackers might get through data breaches because this ensures that hackers penetrating the cloud will not get access to your data. 2.  Protect against phishing and spoofing attacksAs we access our cloud data not only from the mobile and desktop applications, but from browsers as well, this also makes our credentials vulnerable to phishing attacks. Having your data encrypted in the cloud with keys which are totally under your control will ensure that you are protected by state-of-the-art encryption. It is more difficult to steal the encryption keys from your device than taking your credentials via fraudulent emails or websites.3.  Enable “remote-wipe” for lost or stolen devicesThe theft or loss of physical devices containing sensitive business data is a constant worry for business management.  A 2011 survey from Symantec found that 36 percent of U.S. consumers have had their cell phone lost or stolen. But data-centric encryption software which gives you total control over your data anywhere, will also provide a “remote-wipe” functionality. This lets you remotely destroy data on the missing device or make it undecipherable at the push of a button.4.  Eliminate data leakage via public shareable linksWhen a user creates a shareable link on Dropbox or Box, anyone with that link can access the data. These untraceable shared links result to data leakage in many companies. Having the data encrypted in the cloud will eliminate the risk of data loss in the case that the public sharable link is emailed or sent to the wrong recipient.5.  Make ransomware attacks harmlessThe ransomware attacks that hit many countries recently, can send your company into the 'disaster recovery mode’ as well. But you can gain peace of mind after storing your data in the cloud services protected with data-centric encryption. All public cloud services provide a sophisticated data backup and recovery solutions, while the client-side encryption eliminates the value of stolen data as well secures against all other threats coming with the public cloud adoption.Until recently data encryption technologies were too complex for pervasive use and adoption.  But today when almost all security development trends lead to implementing data-centric security, new technologies and products are emerging to address the shortcomings in legacy data encryption technologies and to meet emerging security requirements.                                                                                                                                                                  [author]About the Author: Aram Jivanyan is the CEO and co-founder of BeSafe - Data Security Solution. With BeSafe protection the security and access rights travel with your data everywhere. The users can protect all kinds of data and collaborate securely over cloud services including Gmail, Google Drive, Dropbox, Slack or on the premise file sharing applications without complicating their daily workflow. Find out more about BeSafe at https://besafe.io. [/author]