In a constantly evolving digital landscape, Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) have it tough. Their sole responsibility is to ensure the ongoing security of their organization’s data, technology, and other digital assets. The challenges they face can threaten that security at every level, from managing and controlling user access to staying on top of the latest cyberattack strategies and ensuring compliance with ever-shifting governmental and industry regulations.
Fortunately, CISOs have a lot of tools and technologies they can leverage in their fight against cyberattacks and data loss. One solution that continues to gain ground across industries is cloud object storage. In fact, analysts estimate that the global cloud object storage market will almost triple by the end of the decade—growing from $5.8 billion in 2022 to $15.9 billion by 2030.
Challenges in Data Security and Management
The proliferation of data across sources—between on-premises storage devices and multiple public cloud providers—is the root of a CISO’s data security challenge. Each medium comes with its own set of security concerns and strategies. Whether you’re securing data and applications in hosted data centers, on edge devices, or in the cloud (most likely all three) you have to be prepared to meet challenges where they are. The biggest challenges lie in three distinct areas:
Data Breaches and Cyber Threats
A recent article in Wired called ransomware “the defining cybercrime of the past decade,” while SecurityWeek reported that “2023 had been a high-water mark in ransomware attacks, but 2024 is on course to be worse,” stating that more than 2,500 ransomware attacks were tracked in the first six months of 2024, which averages out to more than 14 publicly claimed attacks a day.
Protecting against ransomware and other evolving attack methods should be a CISO’s top priority, and awareness of new attack strategies and entry points must evolve as quickly as their attackers’ acumen. The more platforms an organization uses to do business and store data, the more potential vulnerabilities they’ll have as well. It’s a never-ending battle for every organization, and the price of defeat can be high.
While educating employees and fostering a culture of security awareness can certainly help ease a CISO’s security efforts, it’s still up to the CISO to choose the right platforms and solutions that allow them to develop, implement, and enforce smart security policies across the organization’s entire IT ecosystem.
Compliance and Regulatory Requirements
The number of data security and privacy regulations that the average enterprise must comply with continues to rise. Before 2023, only five U.S. states had any kind of comprehensive consumer data privacy laws. By the end of the first quarter of 2024, 40 states have initiated or passed beefed-up data privacy laws.
Most of these regulations—such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in healthcare, and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)—have stipulations about the security of data within an organization, as well as how that data is stored, accessed, shared, used, retained, and more.
Data Management and Accessibility
The amount of data that organizations must manage and store today is becoming so massive it’s hard to overstate its volume or significance. As these data volumes grow, managing and accessing that information efficiently without compromising security becomes increasingly complex.
CISOs need to secure more data across more locations and platforms than ever before. They also need to manage and control how that data is accessed, secure it as it moves across systems, and keep it protected in storage.
Benefits of Cloud Object Storage
The challenges today’s CISOs face are daunting, but organizations are increasingly turning to cloud object storage to overcome those challenges efficiently and effectively.
Using cloud object storage is a smart strategy for the modern enterprise primarily because it’s so good at storing the kind of data businesses generate the most: unstructured data. Unstructured data—which includes email and social media content, video footage, audio files, text messages, images, telemetry data, and more—makes up about 80% of today’s data. The other 20% is structured data, which is easy to organize into rows and columns (such as in a spreadsheet), and includes customer account information, inventory levels, product pricing, and bank transaction details.
Object storage helps simplify data analysis and management of both unstructured and structured data. While on-premises object storage does exist, object storage was primarily developed for the cloud and makes great use of the cloud’s inherent scalability, durability, and resilience.
Cloud object storage also provides significant benefits that help CISOs combat their challenges with security, compliance, and data management.
Enhanced Security
Cloud object storage providers typically offer advanced security features that help protect data and applications from unauthorized access and breaches.
Common security features in cloud object storage include:
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Encryption of data, both in transit and at rest, as well as server-side encryption (SSE)
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Strong, fine-grain access control, such as identity and access management tools (IAM), access control lists (ACLs), multi-factor authentication (MFA), and enterprise-grade single sign-on (SSO)
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Continuous monitoring and granular visibility across the entire storage infrastructure
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Immutable buckets, which keep data from being modified or deleted, even by originators or admins
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Data access logs to help accelerate incident response and troubleshooting
Compliance Readiness
Leading cloud storage providers help organizations meet compliance requirements around data privacy, sovereignty, and more with built-in tools for data governance, retention policies, and audit trails.
Continuous monitoring and regular audits are critical to maintaining regulatory compliance. Having visibility into user actions, sign-ons, and access can help IT security teams identify anomalies and pinpoint suspicious behaviors.
Cloud object storage can also be enhanced with features that make it easy to automate some compliance tasks, such as automatically replicating data to a different geographical region to comply with sovereignty laws or the automatic archiving of data for long-term retention when it has reached a certain age.
The providers themselves typically deploy storage in top-tier data centers that are SOC 2 compliant and certified for ISO 27001 and PCI-DSS payment security. Many providers also offer storage services that help organizations comply with specific regulations, such as HIPAA, GDPR, Criminal Justice Information Systems (CJIS), and Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).
Compliance requires deep awareness of what’s going on across the storage infrastructure, and good storage providers deliver the visibility CISOs and their teams need to identify potential noncompliance in terms of data use, sharing, access, retention, and more.
Reliable Backup and Recovery
Part of keeping data secure is having a solid plan for what to do if the worst happens. If your organization experiences a data breach or unexpected data loss, recovering the most critical data and systems as quickly as possible is vital.
Cloud object storage offers robust backup destinations with high durability and availability for multiple copies of essential data. It also enables data replication and automatic failover so organizations can maintain business continuity. Keeping multiple copies of important data across a range of geographic regions increases data resilience and availability.
Some public cloud storage providers offer private vaults, which is a specialized container that allows organizations to store backup data in a location that is secure and separated from main cloud storage. Just as people often store their most precious keepsakes such as jewelry in a physical vault, using a cloud-based vault for storing critical data backups can be a good idea.
Operational Efficiency
Keeping data and other digital assets secure across multiple platforms takes a lot of specialized knowledge as well as sustained effort and time. The benefit of cloud object storage here is that the storage provider handles a lot of that day-to-day security work to keep cloud storage systems protected, including security updates, patching systems, upgrading hardware as needed, and so on. This frees up time for CISOs to develop and manage security policies and IT security teams to spend more time on strategic tasks.
Besides setting security policies to protect data and other systems, CISOs are tasked with keeping their operations on-budget. The more they can get out of those budgets, the better—and cloud object storage can be a way to use that budget more efficiently.
Staying on top of cloud costs is an important part of making sure your organization gets the best value out of your cloud storage.
How Wasabi Can Help
Increased adoption in cloud object storage is a clear indication that organizations in every industry are recognizing the value and benefits cloud storage provides. Using cloud object storage is a smart strategic move for CISOs and organizations that want to enhance data security, streamline compliance, and manage data more efficiently and effectively.
For CISOs, keeping data secure is priority one, but they also need to ensure that that secure data is stored safely, managed efficiently, and made accessible to the right people when they need it. That means finding the right cloud storage solution is extremely important.
We understand today’s security challenges and know how a smart cloud strategy can ease CISOs’ administrative burden while also reducing the complexity and cost of storing and accessing vast amounts of critical data. Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage includes robust security features that meet industry standards, and unique account controls like Multi-User Authentication.
Originally published on the Wasabi Blog, October 15, 2024, by Robert Callaghan
