Security News > 2022 > February > Imperva fellow explains why data privacy is about much more the breaches and just knowing where your data is
Imperva fellow explains why data privacy is about much more the breaches and just knowing where your data is.
I could be a network firewall and say, "By protecting your network, I'm protecting your data. Therefore, I do data security." The same thing would be true of encryption or, even more specific, technologies like tokenization or pseudo-anonymization or all of these things to hide your data in certain ways, all of these are data security and trying to protect data.
If you go back to organizations today, you'll find that most organizations today do not know where their private data is and they don't know that they really could be able to look at everything, but they even don't know where the private data is.
They'd say, "Yes, I know where it is." I would say, "Do you know that it is possible that it could be elsewhere and you know for sure it hasn't gone elsewhere?" They said, "Well, we don't know that. What we know is that of my 100 servers, two of them have credit cards in them." "But you don't know anything about the other 98?" They said, "No, we don't know about the other 98, but I know those credit cards are supposed to be here." I said, "Then you don't actually know where your private data is. You know where your private data is supposed to be."
In the real world, as that private data moves all over through your organization, that's a real big challenge for organizations is if they begin in that world of, "I have to know where all my private data is," that project never ends.
Data security split an element of it that we talked about earlier, that classification angle, that ability to know where your private data happens and where your private data is to the point that you have DPOs running projects that go and classify and find the data to say, "This is where the data exists," because I have DSARs that are going to come in, and when I need to triage a DSAR request, if Terry says, "What data do you have on me?" I want you to delete it or change it.