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Shift Your Data Approach to Better Align with Your Cybersecurity Strategy

Shift Your Data Approach to Better Align with Your Cybersecurity Strategy

Ryan Miles, the Associate Director of Systems Engineering at Nightwing, explains why companies should shift their data approach so it aligns with their cybersecurity strategy. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

According to the 2023-2025 Data Strategy issued by the U.S. Intelligence Community, our greatest data innovation challenge is the capacity to keep pace with the ever-evolving threats faced by data managers, CIOs, and chief data officers. Many organizations are not equipped to field data, analytics, and AI-enabled capabilities at the speed and scale required in today’s threat landscape. In response, technology leaders must rethink data management strategies, with security as the priority at every step. These are just a few approaches and things to remember when evaluating your data footprint and its role in a cybersecurity strategy.

Expand Data Visibility

Historically, organizations have leaned on computer telemetry, network and endpoint logs, cloud logs, and SaaS logs as sources of cybersecurity data. However, with so much data captured from our online interactions, any digital information can become a valuable source when it leads to patterns that expose or highlight potential threats. External sources like crypto wallets, network flow from large internet service providers, or data broker records can also be useful assets for cyber defenders. Even email addresses and social media accounts provide critical information that can uncover malicious or suspicious activity.

This depth and breadth of data provide the intelligence needed to keep up with the pace of today’s threats and inform an organization’s cybersecurity strategy and overall mission. Just one piece of data can be used to feed threat intelligence in multiple ways—a defensive cyber team may examine it to understand how to detect a threat moving forward, while an offensive cyber team may use the same data to understand how to uplevel a threat to be used against bad actors.

Overall, organizations that fail to develop a mature understanding of data are at greater risk for cybersecurity incidents. Equally as important, however, is how all teams across an organization manage and control access to data.

Modernize Your Data Management Practices

To manage, manipulate, and coordinate all this new data, teams cannot rely on today’s manual processes, which are far too slow to keep up with the scale of today’s dynamic threat environment. The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning has enabled organizations to streamline their data and automate decision-making. They’re leaving outdated, inefficient practices behind and adopting newfound strategies to optimize the speed and scale at which data is analyzed.

There’s a catch. Embracing new data acquisition and management strategies is only valuable if properly integrated into existing workflows. Organizations must expand how they collaborate externally and internally across teams, partners, and other stakeholders when handling data. This ensures that organizations uphold their policies, comply with regulations, and abide by ethical standards.

Meet Regulatory Compliance Standards

Many organizations still rely on legacy data, which is often outdated and lacks a standardized structure and quality. This raises concerns over data ownership, policy compliance, and legal standards. At the same time, the sophistication of cyber threats has raised the stakes for protecting and evaluating data. Clearly, all teams across an organization must be responsible for better collaboration and data management.

To maintain data integrity, organizations must keep two critical concepts in mind: data minimization and accountability. Data minimization ties back to downsizing data, only harnessing what’s most useful for your organization’s business needs and cutting out unnecessary data collection. Meanwhile, data accountability helps reduce risk and build trust among employees, customers, and all stakeholders. It consists of making privacy a top-level concern, not just an afterthought, through impact assessments, data processing records, and assignment of data privacy officers.

Foster a Data-Driven Culture

Implementing a superior data management approach requires a mindset shift towards a data-driven culture. Fostering such a culture requires a well-trained, knowledgeable, and data-aware workforce to provide relief as data challenges progress. As a result, leaders must prioritize skills growth and data-centric operations that are consistent with the advances across cybersecurity intelligence and technology.

Searching for talent must also go beyond the typical resume, prioritizing the right characteristics and soft skills (i.e., creativity, critical thinking) that make an individual successful in handling data and operating cybersecurity missions. Furthermore, organizations should consider the increased crossover between data and cybersecurity roles as they look to analyze and integrate multiple datasets efficiently and structure teams accordingly.

As we head into a new year, we can also expect to see rising importance surrounding the Data Protection Officer (DPO) role to ensure strategic AI deployments comply with data protection laws and uphold ethical standards. The reliance on AI for critical decision-making demands a high level of transparency and accountability, and the recent international guidelines for secure AI systems development underscore this urgency. The challenge lies in harmonizing vast data pools while maintaining policy compliance and these ethical standards. The DPO can help ensure this alignment is continued without threatening innovation.

Final Thoughts

The orbits of data strategy and cybersecurity strategy will continue to grow closer, which means we’ll witness more collaboration across these organizational functions. Technology leaders who adopt these practical data procedures and think holistically about how their protocols can be layered into their overall strategic mission will drive innovation and resilient threat security throughout their organizations.


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