Having GDPR compliant processes and procedures is an essential and fundamental part of ensuring a robust data security and management regime is implemented in your organisation. Another crucial and as important component of compliance is having the right tools in place that will support the necessary management, security and monitoring of data assets. This means that you will need to have information at your fingertips about what is happening with your data and your IT infrastructure in general. The technology assets can be quite extensive depending on your environment, but we will focus on just a few elements which are network and device centric. Additional controls will inevitably exist at the application and database level of your infrastructure.
GDPR requirements include breach detection and notification and this is an area where most organisations will need to dramatically improve their approach. Given that most successful breaches steal data within hours while the average time to detect is approaching 100 days, you can see there is a large gap that needs to be bridged. While there may not be the available investment of skilled resources to bridge the gap instantaneously, there are some basic and effective starting points that could bring dramatic and immediate benefits.
Endpoint Security
An effective endpoint security solution will monitor and block threats from compromising the endpoint and propagating threats across your network. Today’s endpoint security must go beyond traditional anti-virus due to the sophistication and ever changing nature of cyber attacks. Systems based only known attacks will be ineffective as malware is able to adapt and evade signature based detection. An advanced endpoint security solution can analyse suspicious files and interrogate up to the second threat intelligence information in the cloud to block attacks that a conventional solution would not notice.
Enhancing endpoint security is, therefore, a quick for organisations looking to significantly improving their security posture at a relatively low cost.
Perimeter Security and threat management
Ask yourself this question, do you know data traffic is coming in or going out of your network? Do you have visibility of what is happening?
Perimeter security for a long time has been about blocking incoming traffic and less about seeing what is going out. Most attacks will rely on data exfiltration as well as callbacks to sites hosting malware.
Implementing effective perimeter security and advanced threat
management will go a long way to dramatically reducing the unwitting interaction between an organisations users or endpoints and known
malware sites. Such a solution must also be good at blocking attempted intrusions as well as scanning file content for threats before allowing
access. Many organisations still have traditional firewalls or have purchased newer devices with advanced features which are yet to be enabled. With the increased regulatory regime of GDPR, it is imperative that the necessary levels of security and threat management are implemented on these platforms. If they do not have the capabilities, they simply need to be replaced with platforms that have a chance of providing protection in the
ever changing threat landscape.
Event Logging and Management
Good IT management will necessitate a security event management tool. The tool will prove invaluable for monitoring, reporting and investigating IT related activity in an organisation.
It can be an effective tool in detecting and preventing attacks by correlating activity and alerts from a number of sources thus aiding in determining the chronology and scope of a security event and it’s root cause. The event management tool will also play a key role in supporting any reporting into a breach because the logs can be analysed to determine the sequence of events and scope of a breach. This will support efforts associated with
the reporting requirements of GDPR for notifying the authorities of breaches.
Correctly specified and implemented technology will have a major role to play in achieving and maintaining good data security standards.