Threat detection: The first line of defense for data security

Cyberattacks are expensive. They can cost millions of dollars to remediate, not including lost revenue due to reputation damage, legal costs, and more. The best way to avoid the expense of a cyberattack is to prevent it from happening in the first place. And that requires continuous monitoring and instant response to any suspicious behavior—before cybercriminals can even touch your data.

When it comes to data security, threat detection is your first line of defense. If you can prevent an attack from happening, you’re already a step ahead. But there’s more to effective threat detection than just setting up some monitoring software.

To do threat protection right, start by classifying your data so that you can apply the right security permissions to it. The more sensitive the data is, the higher the security should be. For example, in a university setting, research and student data requires stronger security than course description data does. After you apply the right permissions to your data, you’re ready to deploy some monitoring software.

To provide effective data security, your threat-monitoring software must continuously monitor data and users across on-premises and cloud environments for anomalies and alert you to any suspicious activity. After they identify an attack, the best threat detection solutions automatically trigger remediation efforts, starting with blocking unauthorized users and making an instant copy of your data at the time of the attack. The key is to have all these actions happen in real time. The inability of your data security solution to detect threats quickly can give a criminal the time that they need to run off with your data. And that is definitely not what you want to happen.

NetApp is an expert in all things data, including data security. No matter where your data lives, NetApp® solutions can help you thwart an attack and send cybercriminals packing. Technologies like the NetApp BlueXP™ classification service help you gain insight into the kind of sensitive data that you have and who has access to it. NetApp ONTAP® software has built-in capabilities to detect anomalous behavior and to prevent malicious or accidental changes to your data from external or internal threats. NetApp Cloud Insights proactively monitors your hybrid and multicloud infrastructure and sends early alerts so that you can stay a step ahead of cybercriminals. Cloud Insights even triggers automatic NetApp Snapshot™ copies and blocks user account storage access as soon as abnormal behavior is detected.

Even customers with some of the strictest data security requirements trust NetApp technology to help them detect cyberthreats and keep their data safe. For example:

• A small college in South Florida wanted to get out of the IT management game and migrate from an on-premises data center to a fully managed solution. By using NetApp Cloud Data Sense, they could see detailed information about their sensitive data and whether or not it was exposed. This insight helped them securely migrate sensitive information like personal student data to its new hybrid cloud location.
• After a ransomware attack, a global leader in bulk transportation deployed Cloud Insights to detect threats and to boost its data security. Early threat detection, automatic anomaly detection, machine learning, and behavior analytics in the Cloud Secure feature of Cloud Insights are a crucial part of the company’s data security. In fact, the company’s director of IT described these capabilities as the “home run” that his organization needed to stay ahead of cybercriminals.

Threat detection is critical for data security. The sooner you can detect suspicious behavior, the sooner you can stop an attack and prevent a long, costly recovery. In my next blog, I’ll talk about threat remediation and the role that it plays in data security.

In the meantime, you can learn more about how NetApp solutions can help you detect threats and keep cyberattackers at bay.