What is data security?

Ransomware. Rogue administrators. Hackers. Cyberthreats come in all shapes and sizes. That’s why building the best data security defense is crucial for every organization. With the right processes, solutions, and strategy, you’ll be able to keep your data secure across your hybrid or multicloud environment. 

So what is data security?

True data centric security is built on two foundational blocks: threat detection and threat remediation. They work together to secure your data through every stage of an attack, from the initial hand-raise alerting you that something looks amiss to the post-event forensic analysis of your response. 

An alarm raised after criminals have already run away with your valuables isn’t much help. That’s why real-time threat detection and threat remediation are so critically important. Data security happens in real time, so you can catch and thwart threats as quickly as possible. 

Building block 1: Threat detection
Threat detection focuses on monitoring and identifying threats as soon as possible—ideally before they ever touch your data. Examples include: 

• Anomaly monitoring (user behavior and file systems) 
• Malware detection 
• Storage performance monitoring 

Building block 2: Threat remediation
Threat remediation involves responding appropriately to the threat and recovering from the attack, as quickly and cleanly as possible. Examples include:

• Recovery point creation 
• Data and application recovery 
• Forensic analysis 

Data security is vitally important for keeping your data safe, but it’s not the whole story. To come out ahead of cybercriminals, organizations are increasingly looking at a wider picture: cyber resilience. 

Cyber resilience combines data protection with data security, keeping your business running whether the threat comes from a perimeter breach or from the inside. 

In protecting your business, the best defense is a good offense. Cyber resilience helps you put the right data centric security and protection in place before an attack happens, so you’re prepared and able to survive anything that cybercriminals throw your way.

As one of the largest hospitals in Switzerland, Kantonsspital Winterthur (KSW) knows the importance of data centric security. KSW delivers primary clinical care as a consolidated central hospital, accessing 270,000 patient cases each year. This highly sensitive patient data has to be quickly available, without being vulnerable to cyberattacks.  

With NetApp^® data security solutions, KSW has built an infrastructure that blends performance with protection: 

• Converting a few large volumes to 20 smaller volumes so that restoring is faster and easier   
• Hourly backups mirrored across sites and maintained for up to a year  
• A 1-hour recovery point objective  

Colleges and universities need to focus on serving students' needs, not on managing IT. But with sensitive information like personal student data to protect, a small college in South Florida needed data security solutions that didn’t compromise protection during a migration.  

NetApp and Veytec teamed up to support the migration, while saving big on TCO and boosting data centric security:  

• Identifying set permissions in the original environment to correctly secure data across its new hybrid cloud location  
• Deploying governance and compliance capabilities for immediate insight into all types of data  
• Classifying data to create automated compliance reports for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), and privacy risk assessment  

Protecting details of U.S. security is no small task, and there's no room for error. A U.S. government department that was upgrading its IT needed solutions that would meet critical security protocols, while keeping data easily accessible.   

 The department turned to NetApp, building a “classified cloud” that meets those security protocols, reduces the storage footprint, and paves the way for future expansion. 

• Accelerating data recovery from days to minutes  
• Deploying multitenancy to carve storage into individual pieces that are accessible privately by users or networks as appropriate  
• Embedding disaster recovery and continual-operations capabilities