Data Security
What is Data Security?
Data security is the process of protecting digital data from unauthorized access, corruption, or theft that may occur from a breach in physical security or a data breach or cyber-attack.
What is zero trust?
As the name suggests, zero trust is a security concept that is based on the concept of “never trust, always verify,” which means no connected devices are ever trusted by default. Zero trust methodology treats every request to access a network or data as a potential threat, so the identity must be authenticated and verified before any access is granted. Zero trust also includes constant authentication and verification to secure access, as users may often switch between devices, platforms, and locations.
Data-centric security
Data-centric security is an approach that is focused on protecting the data, rather than a broader approach that focuses on the people, processes, and/or networks that make up a security program. The traditional approach sees data as one of many things that need to be protected; data-centric security sees data as the center of the protection initiative.
What is a secure development lifecycle (SDLC)?
Every product goes through a lifecycle, beginning with planning and design and evolving through production, testing, maintenance, updates, and eventually retirement. A secure development lifecycle imbues each of those lifecycle steps with security measures and integrates security-thinking into the design and evolution of a product (commonly software).
Why data security?
Because data is a corporate asset, protecting it from internal or external unauthorized access, corruption, or theft is critical. However, the traditional approach to security has become much more complicated as technology has evolved and corporate networks have become more complex, providing more avenues for data breaches to occur.
Data security ensures that access to a corporate network, data, applications, and services is authenticated and verified prior to access being granted. In addition to compromised intellectual property and leaked customer information that may result from poor data security, the aftermath of a security breach can be extremely costly to businesses. In 2021, the average cost of a data breach was $4.24M, and that figure steadily climbs.
Who needs data security?
Most people have a password on their phone, their computer at work, and/or their tablet or home computer. At the personal level, everyone wants their data secure, so it stands to reason that most people would want their consumer and personal data safe at the enterprise level. Everyone needs data security, so organizations must treat data security as germane to business health.
Currently, many countries require regulatory compliance with data security; Many are already talking about the probability of creating liability clauses in cases where a data breach or cyber-attack leads to the exposure of sensitive personal consumer data. This security-first approach to data, cloud-based business operations, and the consumer experience scales from privately owned “mom and pop” brick and mortar shops, all the way up to publicly traded multinational corporations.
HPE and data security
HPE has long been an innovator in data security offerings from servers to hypervisors to networks to storage, providing the expertise and cost savings organizations need to remain secure in an era where “data is the new oil.”
HPE’s Project Aurora enables zero-trust security architectures from edge-to-cloud to transform security from a barrier to an innovation accelerator by providing a complete security architecture with new embedded and integrated security solutions starting with the HPE Silicon Root of Trust. The initial release of Project Aurora security capabilities will be embedded within HPE GreenLake Lighthouse to automatically and continuously verify the integrity of the hardware, firmware, operating systems, platforms, and workloads, including workloads from security vendors. This continuous attestation will enable HPE to quickly detect advanced threats in seconds, which can help minimize data loss and unauthorized encryption (and corruption) of valuable data and intellectual property.
HPE is the leading contributor to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) SPIFFE and SPIRE open-source projects, which were recently accepted into the CNCF Incubator. SPIFFE and SPIRE provide a standard and tooling for establishing trust between software services—without necessarily using secrets or network-based security controls. SPIFFE is a set of open-source standards for securely authenticating software services in dynamic and heterogeneous environments through the use of platform-agnostic, cryptographic identities. SPIRE is an open-source system that implements the SPIFFE specification in a wide variety of environments. SPIFFE and SPIRE help enable zero trust by delivering continuously attested service identity across cloud, container, and on-premise enterprise IT infrastructure. These projects enable organizations to deploy consistent, fine-grained cross-service authentication via a “dial-tone” API across heterogeneous environments.
In the future, HPE will embed open-source technologies like SPIFFE and SPIRE into Project Aurora to enable our DevOps and security engineers to deliver workload identities rooted in continuously verified HPE hardware. This entire capability will eventually be embedded across HPE GreenLake cloud services and the HPE Ezmeral software portfolio.