Sensitive SaaS Data: Managing Access To IT

Now that you know what sensitive SaaS data you have and have been able to classify it based upon your own guidelines associated with your business(es), you need to decide how to properly manage access to it. It’s vital that you do this securely; as allowing the wrong individuals access to sensitive data can mean you’re potentially violating a regulation tied to the data or opening your organization to unnecessary risk.

The Problem With Sensitive Data

If your team is making data available in SaaS apps, such as Slack, O365 or Jira, it’s even more important to know who has access to it. Regardless of the SaaS tools used by your teams to send data to one another, you must know who’s accessing and sharing it at all times.

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With cybercrime only increasing and in some cases even exploding during the pandemic, securing your SaaS data is now more important than ever. Canalys, a technology market analysis firm, estimated that more than 30 billion data records were stolen in 2020, more than in the previous 15 years combined and the FBI has reported that the number of cyberattacks is doubling. This trend is only going to grow in the years to come, so ensuring your data is protected by tackling where it is and who is accessing it is critical.

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Some of the key points to think about regarding SaaS data include:

• What information is contained within the data?
• Who owns it?
• How sensitive is it?
• How is it going to be used?
• Who is it being shared with?

How to Secure Sensitive Data In A SaaS World

Any modern organization needs a new approach to managing data access and governance in order to protect data when it’s sent across the latest SaaS tools. If you’re not doing this, your data is most likely getting into the wrong hands by human error or malicious actors, which could have grave consequences for your business. But how can you safely and quickly allow your IT and security teams know what’s happening with the sensitive data in your SaaS tools? One of the most important and fundamental ways to do this is through data classification. Data classification allows you to 1) categorize your data and then 2) gives you visibility into who has access to it, 3) remediate immediately.

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At Reco we have a unique and different approach to help you solve what can often be a daunting and expensive endeavor; we apply business based analytics to do the mapping automatically on a continuous basis and then calculate an estimated risk level when sensitive data is accessed, deleted, sent, or shared. To do this we don’t just rely on a single attribute, but instead we use advanced analytics to cross-reference the data with who is interacting with it; could be with other users or themselves. This allows your teams to properly assess a level of risk, and where necessary you can then work toward reducing risk as we want to be sure that an action is necessary vs. simply stopping business from legitimately being done. Where necessary, your teams can take action to correct, such as changing who has access to the data, storing it more securely, or enforcing configuration settings.

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Having a way to automatically analyze the interactions between BOTH users and the data they’re accessing makes reducing the risk level much easier. Having a way to send true alerts when potentially sensitive data is being shared is even better. Not only does Reco’s s do all this, but it offers solutions within your existing data and security tools to fix problems that may arise if sensitive data is ever sent or shared where it shouldn’t be.

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A secure and innovative organization needs a secure and innovative solution; that’s where Reco can help you. Reco’s data security solution uses data context to classify and protect sensitive assets shared on SaaS platforms such as; Slack, Jira, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and more.

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Request a demo today to find out just how effective we are at helping you protect your data and reduce risk.

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Resources:

1. https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/cybersecurity-investment-2020
2. https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/press-releases/fbi-releases-the-internet-crime-complaint-center-2020-internet-crime-report-including-covid-19-scam-statistics

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