Unissant Corporate Website | Data Security

Unissant White Paper

Data Security–Unissant Cyber

Data Security–Unissant Cyber

Data, the digital building blocks of information, are a valuable corporate asset outlasting applications and processes. Data are used as input into tactical and strategic decisions. Analysis and management of data allow organizations to learn and grow. Data are received from and transmitted to customers and business partners. Data are reported to investors and regulators and used by the media. Data flow through every process your organization runs and are used by every individual your organization employs. As important as your central nervous system is to your body, data are to your organization. Data signal when you should move, how fast, and in what direction. If those signals are infected, corrupted, or stolen, you may find yourself paralyzed into inaction, moving in the wrong direction at the wrong speed, or see a competitor take your Intellectual Property (IP) and dominate a market.
Ideally, an organization should aim for protecting all their IP. Unissant recognizes that desire for some organization to protect all their data while at the same time we understand the constraints that come into picture trying to do so. One such constraint is the resources required to protect ALL data at the highest level. Thus, we assist organizations in prioritizing their data protection strategies based on proven frameworks and methodologies tested in both the government and financial industry. We start with multiple factors using probing questions and then lead our customers through our process to discover what data needs protecting and at what level is appropriate based on the data.

When speaking with organizations about data security, we often start with some high-level questions like below:

How will you do it?
Who must be involved?
Where will it be stored?
What data needs to be protected?

These are very high-level important questions but, often with long government decision trees, the biggest question gets delayed…when will it be protected? Unissant has developed frameworks and partnership with data loss prevention leaders to start protecting data on day one while developing data governance within the organization to narrow down what needs to be protected.
The evaluation of the organization goes deeper into the data strategy. We will want to understand the business drivers for your data strategy. Are you in an offensive or defensive position today and where do you want to be?

Data Modernization Approach

Once the data strategy is identified, the data governance steps follow.

Data Challenges-Typical

Data Governance is the process and people charged with directing, guiding, and regulating the usage of an organization’s data assets in order to optimize its value and control associated risks.

Ultimately, all your organization’s data should be governed, but it is not realistic to tackle all of it at once. Combining & applying the dimensions of criticality, commonality, and quality to your organization’s data assets to establish a prioritized list of data categories is a key initial step on the path to data governance.

Some data are more critical than others. Their degree of importance is driven by usage – i.e. the criticality of the processes, reports, or decisions relying upon those data. Each organization will have a different view on their most critical processes and decisions and, therefore, pieces of information. To make things more complex, this view will change over time.

A good data governance function addresses each of the following areas:

Data Acquisition & Integration – What data sources should be used (external and internal) and what sources are being used? For homogeneous data coming from multiple sources, what is the proper priority of sources and how are entities uniquely identified? For heterogeneous data, how should the data relate to each other and new data derive from the intersection?
Data Usage – Which processes, systems, and reports use the data and why? How do the data flow along the process and system information supply chain and do the parties involved understand and agree to their direct dependencies and dependents?
Data Quality – How complete, accurate, and valid are the data in relation to their stated usage purposes? What risks is the organization exposed to due to defects with the data (non-conformance to stated business rules)?
Data Persistence – Where and how should data be stored; how long should data be kept readily available, archived, and purged; how many redundant copies of the same data should be kept and how many actually exist?
Data Definition – What are the conceptual, logical, and physical names and descriptions of the data; how do they relate to other data attributes and objects (entities); what type of data are they and what domain of values are allowed?
Data Security – Who authorizes access to the data and what mechanism(s) are used; how are the data classified from a sensitivity and privacy perspective; how are the data protected from loss, theft, and unauthorized intrusions?

Unissant understands that Implementing a data governance program and sustaining its value over the long term is a tough proposition for many organizations. This is primarily due to the need for organizational change management, which arises because data governance often forces the organization to operate much differently from status quo.

Unissant’s approach to Data Protection consists of 5 phases:

Phase 1: Discover
Phase 2: Identify/Clean
Phase 3: Classify
Phase 4: Secure
Phase 5: Monitor

To give our customers a 360 protection that includes data policy, governance technological protections, Unissant has partnered with Forcepoint. Forcepoint DLP is an industry leader in data loss prevention (DLP) as it protects intellectual property and regulated data against malicious attackers, insider threats, and accidental loss wherever data resides in the cloud, on the network, or on endpoint devices. With Forcepoint DLP, an organization can easily demonstrate compliance and avoid costly fines and headlines. Specifically, Forcepoint DLP supports:

Our employment of Forcepoint Dynamic Data Protection (DDP) Suite in our offerings includes capabilities spanning:

Data discovery
Data classification (using Bolden James OEM)
DLP on endpoint, network and cloud (DLP Cloud Apps)
CASB
Automated Policy Enforcement (using Forcepoint Behavior Analytics for Risk Adaptive response)

Forcepoint Data Protection Components

** Below we have shown where Forcepoint solutions are employed in each phase of our framework.

Unissant’s approach to Data Security starts with the discovery phase. In this phase Unissant focuses on three pillars: People, Processes and Technologies. Each one of these pillars will help us understand your organization’s data and how they are produced and consumed as we progress through the framework.

We will use Data Loss Prevention (DLP) /Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) Discovery to find data across the organization’s network. This includes data in the traditional data center, data stored in cloud and cloud services like Office 365 and Box Enterprise. There may be terabytes of data discovered and, with our technology partner, we will begin to protect it on day one. The result of this phase will be a complete inventory of all data sources across the organization and everything will be secured. An organization could stop right here but they still won’t understand how the organization’s data are produced and consumed and what are the critical data elements of each data source.