Data-driven is the norm

Just like every company became a technology company in the early 2000s, every company is now becoming a data company. For effective marketing and sales, for operational efficiency, for financial management - companies that win and companies that leverage data to learn are now one and the same.

Data used to be hidden from view, wrapped inside of applications wrapped inside of bespoke IT infrastructure. Now it's in the Cloud, inside of platforms like Snowflake or Amazon Redshift that put it right at the fingertips of anyone in your company. Massively scalable, cost effective, supported by thousands of ecosystem technologies - the opportunity here is incredible.

Also incredible are the new risks to data. When it's right at the fingertips of everyone in your company, it's more easy for it to be improperly shared or stolen than ever.

How do you get control over your data?

Do you focus on the infrastructure? Well, it's not yours anymore so while you can and should configure security over your cloud infrastructure correctly, you will never truly control it.

Do you focus on the people? Identity or attributes of identity work well in small numbers but get incredibly complex at any level of scale, and identities get compromised all of the time.

The answer

Don't treat the firewall or the login screen as the endpoint; treat the data as the endpoint.

This approach starts with partners like OneTrust, BigID, and others that help you understand your data and get a handle on how it should be made private and secure in order to comply with an ever-more-complex regulatory environment. You need a big brain to look at all of your data across your whole company and document the needed controls to keep your data-driven enterprise safe.

But you also need to be able to act. Your data risk management brain needs muscle to be able to control every place where sensitive data exists in real-time. This isn't just managing simple access to well-defined datasets but also watching consumption levels, with enough sensitivity to detect activity against data that is unusual and indicative of stolen credentials. This is what we are building at ALTR, and the concept of a unified data control plane across your entire organization that treats data as the endpoint is what animates our product strategy.

Right now it's all about the data - the opportunity and the risks. With the right data-first defensive strategy in place to mitigate those risks, the world of opportunity opens up to you.

To learn more, watch our webinar "The Hidden ROI: Taking a Security-First Approach to Modern Data Architectures".