Organizations are moving more data to the cloud than ever before. According to a 2019 Deloitte study of more than 500 IT leaders, security and data protection is the top driver for moving data to the cloud, moving ahead of traditional reasons like reduced costs and improved performance. With cyber security threats continuing to increase in volume and effectiveness, it makes sense that companies would look to cloud providers and online data warehouses for expert, enterprise level security and protection.  

But while some companies are comfortable with this shift, others feel like it’s too much too fast. Because they've been used to maintaining data within their own data centers with their own security solutions and policies, moving both data and security to a third party can seem like there’s just too much outside IT and security managers' control. Various security providers have stepped in with products that deliver that control, many using a cloud proxy server. While at first glance this may seem like an ideal solution, it’s really a step back from the benefits of moving to the cloud. Let's look at when it makes sense to use a cloud proxy for data security and when it does not.

A cloud proxy may seem like a good compromise, but it comes with limitations

Vendor-provided cloud proxy security solutions do have some advantages: they can allow you to set up your own policies and maintain custom control over who accesses data, when and how. They can also allow you to centralize control across a wide variety of cloud data stores because they’re not tied to a specific platform or API. But along with this level of control comes additional work for your team.  

You’ll have to worry about deploying, maintaining, upgrading and scaling this additional component in your infrastructure – responsibilities you’ve tried to avoid by moving to the cloud. If you choose a standalone cloud proxy you’ll run into the privacy issues of sending data through a third party. You’ll also need to modify all your applications to go through the cloud proxy. And if you have applications that don’t go through the proxy, you can’t see what users are doing with your data, let alone stop them. The applications that do go through the proxy may run into issues when cloud platforms make configuration changes you’re unaware of, forcing downtime. Many of the largest cloud applications and data platforms, like Microsoft Office 365, discourage proxy use.  

Control of your data, without owning the infrastructure: the future of cloud platforms

The good news is that today you have options that didn’t exist even a few years ago. As more and more applications, workloads, and data move to the cloud, more and more supporting infrastructure is moving as well. Leading cloud apps and platform providers are building in ways for you to have the same kind of hands-on control over your data you had when it lived on your infrastructure or even via a cloud proxy security solution – because it is your data. Salesforce, for example, allows users to disguise and tokenize emails in their platform using a third-party service, making them visible only at the point of sending a mass email via marketing automation software. The leading SaaS providers understand they can gain competitive advantage by helping users who were not as comfortable with the move to the cloud get comfortable.  

Snowflake is a leader in this space as well, seeing themselves as part of that larger cloud ecosystem. Snowflake provides an extensible platform that allows you to choose to run the platform’s powerful security tools or integrate third-party security solutions like ALTR that sit beside the data, instead of between the data and your users like a proxy would. You get all the benefits of a cloud solution – scalability, stability, low maintenance – and all the advantages of running your own security – the ability to mask data so it’s invisible to Snowflake, for example. This allows you to maintain that sense of “checks and balances.”  

Today’s best platforms understand that they’re part of a cloud infrastructure and data ecosystem, and they’re allowing other products to plug and play natively vs using a cloud proxy to provide those features. The future of sensitive data in the cloud is integrations like this, and cloud data stores will continue to launch features that allow users to control their data more intimately.  

The benefits of a cloud platform with control of your sensitive data. That’s where the future is.

Want to see how ALTR integrates with OneTrust and Snowflake? Check out our on demand webinar, "Simplifying Data Governance (and Security) through Automation." Click here to learn more!

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