White paper. Ensuring Big Data Security with Identity and Access Management

Transcription

1 White paper Ensuring Big Security with Identity and Access Management

2 Summary: Enterprises today are collecting more data than ever before, from a huge variety of sources. This Big presents both an opportunity and a risk. A well-run Big project can uncover tremendous value for an organization, by revealing customer buying habits, detecting or preventing fraud, or monitoring real-time events for competitive advantage. A poorly-run Big project can be a security and compliance nightmare, leading to data breaches, compliance investigations, and brand-damaging press coverage. In short, the data that makes up a Big set must be protected, to ensure that only the right people have appropriate access to it. Organizations need a modern and comprehensive Identity and Access Management solution to protect their Big, while safely enabling the business to obtain maximum value from it. 2 Ensuring Big Security with Identity and Access Management

3 What is Big? Big refers to the large, complex and varied sets of information that organizations are collecting today, and which require new and innovative technologies to analyze, process, and understand. Big data is typically made up of both structured and unstructured data, collected from many disparate sources. For example, an online retailer might collect real-time data from website logs, visitor clickstreams, completed transactions, loyalty card usage, shopping card abandonment, promotions, social media mentions, and advertisements. Analyzing this data can provide the retailer with tremendously valuable insights into areas such as customer behavior, or marketing and promotion effectiveness. However, because this data is enormous, constantly changing, and very complex, it requires non-traditional storage and analysis tools. Specifically, this data cannot be stored in a traditional relational database, or even in a single system, since it s collected from a variety of sources and stored in a variety of formats. Likewise, there is no single application for analyzing Big ; instead there are numerous open source and commercial frameworks and statistical analysis packages that enterprises deploy, customize, and use to evaluate their Big repositories. Figure 1 below shows a sample Big project architecture. Analytics Owners Technical Analysts Business Analysts Real-Time Streams Real-Time Processing Direct Access Analytics Tools Visualization Tools Batch Import (ETL) Batch Processing Structured & Unstructured Sources and Import Storage Infrastructure Figure 1: Simple Example of a Big Project Architecture Enterprises are investing a great deal of time and effort to collect, explore and analyze this data, in order to help them understand market trends, better serve customers, and unlock corporate value. However, these new projects are not risk free as Forrester Research states, Big equals big security threats 1. Let s explore why this is the case, and how enterprises can best prevent their big data initiatives from turning into security liabilities. 1: Forrester Research: Control And Protect Sensitive Information In The Era Of Big, July 2012 Ensuring Big Security with Identity and Access Management 3

4 Big Must Be Protected Big data projects very often include data which would be damaging to the enterprises if leaked. For example, customer data often includes personally identifiable information (PII), buying habits, or credit card information. Clinical, genomic, or scientific data often contains sensitive intellectual property. And financial data can have both of these risks associated with it. In today s threat environment with nation-states and cyberthieves actively attempting to compromise data InfoSec organizations must take a proactive approach to protecting their Big initiatives, while still allowing the business to access and analyze this rich and valuable data set. According to Forrester Research, Amassing greater data volumes increases the risk that a cybercriminal or insider (malicious or otherwise) can readily compromise sensitive information. Therefore, in order to secure big data environments, you should strictly limit the number of people that can access data and continuously monitor those users access levels throughout their employment. 2. The good news for enterprises is that a modern and comprehensive Identity and Access Management (IAM) platform provides precisely these capabilities. Let s explore this further. How Can Big Be Secured? From an information security perspective, there are many ways in which Big projects align with standard IAM business processes and policies, which enterprises should already have in place. For example, organizations need to be performing regular access reviews (also known as certifications), to ensure that people only have access to application entitlements which are appropriate to their job function, role, and responsibilities. The same type of process a periodic access review must be performed to validate people s access to the big data resource (as well as the applications used to analyze them). Likewise, other standard IAM processes such as access reviews when people change roles, or access request and approval processes must also incorporate Big access. The bottom line is that organizations need a modern, scalable, and comprehensive IAM platform. This platform must be able to incorporate management of access to both structured and unstructured data resources, along with management of access to fine-grained application entitlements. It must also be able to easily connect with these data sources, so it can collect and unify user access data. Finally, it must provide business context around who has access to what, so that InfoSec, data and application owners, and line-of-business managers can all easily see and agree to policies that determine an appropriate level of access to data, based on user identity, role, and job function. Without a robust IAM program in place, organizations Big projects are putting them at considerable risk of data breaches, fines, and damaging cyber-attacks. Information security professionals must proactively identify active Big projects in their organizations, and ensure that access to this data is limited to the appropriate people. With this approach, enterprises can safely and securely realize the value promised by their Big initiatives. 2: Forrester Research: Control And Protect Sensitive Information In The Era Of Big, July Ensuring Big Security with Identity and Access Management

5 ABOUT AVEKSA Aveksa provides the industry s most comprehensive Business-Driven Identity and Access Management platform. By uniquely integrating Identity and Access Governance, Provisioning and Authentication, Aveksa enables enterprises to manage the complete lifecycle of user access for SaaS and On-premise applications and data. With Aveksa, IT organizations can reduce Access Management complexity and increase operational efficiency while minimizing risk and ensuring sustainable compliance. Aveksa provides enterprises with the industry s fastest time to value with over 90% of customers reporting live implementations of the company s business-driven Identity & Access Management solutions and over 80% of these customers live with the latest version of the Aveksa platform. For more information, visit ABOUT INNET InNet partners with customers to design, deploy, and support a full suite of advanced technology solutions focusing upon enterprise networks, information security, storage, virtualization and business continuity. InNet brings many years of trusted and valuable experience from a myriad of customer perspectives working with leading enterprise and corporate customers to deliver technology that meets business objectives InNet