Data Dynamics recently released the latest version of their analytics-driven data management product Insight AnalytiX, upgraded to help customers with flexible and scalable data discovery, deep analytics, and reduced data vulnerability. The enhancements were made to strengthen the product’s data protection and data security functionalities.
To learn more about the newest features and their value to the customer, we interviewed Piyush Mehta, CEO of Data Dynamics. In conversation with him, we learned about the latest trends in Data Security, how the upgraded Insight AnalytiX 1.4 meets some of the business-critical needs of effective risk identification & remediation, and his vision for the product.
Let’s take a closer look at Piyush’s perspective on ensuring data security in the rising era of data risk due to the influx of unstructured data.
What are the Best Practices that enterprises can deploy to strengthen data security?
Piyush: Today, the biggest challenge in the unstructured data world is the spread of data sprawl across a global environment, ranging from local shares that people create and cloud repositories to application repositories. The first step to ensuring data security in such an environment is understanding your data landscape and identifying sensitive data.
Data Security = Data Understanding + Data Discovery
Enterprises looking to strengthen their data security posture should get answers to these eight questions before planning their security strategy.
- What data do you have?
- What is the landscape of the data sprawl?
- What data needs to be secured?
- Who is the owner of that data?
- Who is using the data?
- How often is the data accessed?
- Is there business-sensitive or personal data that need governance?
- Is the governance because of regulatory or internal compliance reasons?
Getting answers to these questions is the first step in securing your data, as it works like a filtering mechanism to determine the data that needs protection and is at maximum risk. You cannot plan an efficient security process without this knowledge. Approaches to Data Security
Many enterprises consider air gapping their data. Air gapping data means it has no access to the outside world. But air-gapping data is not a favorable option, as it does not bring value to the business. The good part of air gapping is that your data remains immutable, and the bad part is you cannot extract any value to benefit your enterprise or customers.
So, air gapping is a good backup option to create a tertiary copy of your data.
Here are five best practices that can help enterprises in strengthening their data security strategy:
- Define your data security needs and identify data that needs to be secured
- Identify business-critical and personal data lying in the unstructured data sprawl
- Control access to sensitive data by providing role-based access to only authorized people
- Implement automation in the process to reduce potential risk exposure
- Comply with security and privacy regulations based on your region and industry
How is Data Dynamics helping organizations build robust security practices?
Piyush: At Data Dynamics, we address the security aspect by first identifying the data that exists in the system, then determining the complexity and sensitivity of the data and its context. For example, in the healthcare industry, Data Dynamics addresses:
- Where is the data residing
- Who is accessing it
- What is the content within the data
Patient information is critical in the healthcare sector. Data Dynamics’ Insight AnalytiX helps reduce sensitive data exposure. Its Privacy Risk Classification functionality discovers and tags unstructured data containing sensitive or private information to empower data custodians to manage that data while maintaining compliance and privacy standards.
At the same time, the ControlX solution enables a unique approach to secure the data by providing controlled access. It allows us to keep an immutable log for any changes in the system, giving details about who is accessing what data at what time. The product uses blockchain technology to detect patterns and set rules to identify the most sensitive data points and secure them tightly.
Tell us more about the latest version of Insight AnalytiX 1.4
Piyush: With the ever-increasing and evolving canvas of cyber-attacks, every enterprise is focused on securing more and more of their business-critical and personal data. The latest upgrade in Data Dynamics’ Insight AnalytiX 1.4 makes it an excellent risk identification and remediation product. It allows users to generate a Data Insight report on a dataset by building advanced multi-level logical expressions and a combination of logical operators. It reduces the chances of missing sensitive personal data, ensuring the highest accuracy in data discovery. The report is powered by deep analytics (both descriptive and diagnostic) to help enterprises understand the risk and easily quantify it.
What sets Insight Analytix apart from other products?
Piyush: The three important points about Insight Analytix that gives it a competitive edge are:
- It is a part of a single aggregate platform that derives everything from infrastructure optimization to detailed analytics, risk identification, remediation, and actionability around protecting that data. So in all, the product addresses all four pillars, from analytics, mobility, and security to compliance.
- Insight AnalytiX is a key component of the platform because it allows us to look within the data to identify the key characteristics. This feature can be tied with the data studio to create context-based data scanning for accurate risk analysis.
- The product includes a lot of intelligence for data scanning that helps with better pattern recognition. It uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to the best extent possible for continuous improvement in the scanning process for more accurate results.
To further highlight, the top three features provided by IX1.4 that enterprises can leverage for better PII data discovery and risk classification are:
- As a part of a data studio, Insight AnalytiX is designed with the ability to create a weighted understanding of your data depending on the level of its sensitivity, potential risk exposure, and tagging that data to the risk associated.
- It provides customized templates for enterprises to create their repositories comprising personal identifiable information or business-sensitive data as different business units might have varied and specific requirements.
- It allows enterprises to leverage the intelligence built into the product for smart data discovery to reduce the number of false positives and falses negatives and create risk classification standards for identifying the risks based on the search context.
What is your vision for Insight AnalytiX and Data Dynamics?
Piyush: Insight AnalytiX is a key component of our unified unstructured data management platform. And we will continue to work on integrations with additional repositories where we can provide open APIs to ingest the data directly into the product. The goal is to drive actionability & remediation to address potential risks identified by using one of our other products, ControlX. The product helps enterprises mitigate the risk of sensitive data access and misuse through a robust, multi-approver remediation workflow. ControlX provides the ability to quarantine at-risk datasets and intelligently re-permission files while creating an immutable audit log powered by blockchain technology. My vision for Data Dynamics is to provide data democratization, where consumers can partake in the value of the data they create. Our journey started with our ability to help enterprises mitigate risks, secure, optimize, and manage their data, but continues to evolve and enhance as we continue to develop our unified platform.
To know more about the latest upgrade of the Insight AnalytiX solution, visit our website or read our latest PR – Data Dynamics’ Insight AnalytiX enhances its Data Protection and Security Functionalities. For further queries or interests, reach out to us at solutions@datdyn.com or click here to book a meeting.
