The Data Confidence Gap: Why Organizations Still Can’t Trust Their Data

In the era of big data, the ultimate irony is that many companies are too afraid to use their own.

The data confidence gap has become a significant aspect of security discussions today, as different departments approach the table with varying metrics, and none of them align. 

For a company to use its information in a way that genuinely moves the business forward, every party that leverages that data needs to be on the same page. And unless every party has access to the same data (and all the same data, with no gaps or blind spots), there’s no way they can be.

Enter: Fortra Data Security Posture Management (DSPM). Fortra DSPM does the hard work of discovering, classifying, and protecting data, so that organizations can make business-driven decisions - and make them with confidence.

Defining the “Data Confidence Gap”

What Is the “Data Confidence Gap”? 

Simply put, the data confidence gap is the discomfort that comes when organizations don’t know where all their data is, don’t know how secure it is, and therefore can’t use it for business-boosting purposes with any degree of certainty. 

A Chronic Misassumption?

We see it in sales, and we also see it in security. When discussing “data-driven decisions,” we often assume that the data driving those decisions is complete and accurate. 

• This means that the data we input into our AI models (and AI-powered security solutions) is assumed to be complete. 

• This means that the security decisions we make based off those models are also assumed to be accurate.

• This means that we are therefore putting our security resources in the right place.

Right? But what if that data was wrong? What if the data feeding our models was incomplete, inaccurate, filled with duplicates and errors, and throwing our numbers off downstream?

Key Causes – And Consequences - of the Data Confidence Gap

As the saying goes, a giant gate swings on small hinges. A slight difference in data at the outset could lead to wide discrepancies in the outcome. So, where does the problem start?

Shadow Data: Data you don’t know about can’t be tracked, protected, or used. Complete data is the first step to data quality.

• At best, it’s data that’s not being utilized to drive decisions, and that’s information your company has collected and has the right to use to better its business.

• At worst, it’s a sitting liability. Unseen data is unprotected data, so not only are you not benefiting from it, but you are leaving your customers exposed and a giant “breach me” sign open to attackers.

Fragmented Governance: As companies hodgepodge tools in an environment, policies can vary across the board. This makes governance a challenge, and secure data is the foundation of data integrity.

• At best, things become way more complicated as teams struggle to manage a patchwork of compliance and governance policies for different data at different times.

• At worst, things fall through the cracks as key security controls are missed, the chance for human error and misconfigurations increases, and data is not protected in the same way wherever it goes. 

Cloud Complexity: Finding and protecting cloud data can be like herding cats - cats that drop needles in haystacks. With the cloud democratising tech availability, it can be challenging for everything to be managed by IT.

• At best, security teams spend their days running around putting out cloud alert fires and hoping they have everything covered. They’re likely leveraging multiple security dashboards (one for each tool) and spending valuable time switching between them on a daily basis.

• At worst, you’ve got an enormous cloud security oversight dilemma. Shadow SaaS and other hidden (or lost) cloud assets are rampant, unapproved applications serve as ticking time-bombs, and governance (much less compliance) is faulty - if not non-existent. You know it: everyone is in cloud survival mode.

Fortra DSPM Brings Data Confidence Back to the Table

It’s been cited that data scientists spend 80% of their time finding, cleaning, and organizing data inputs, which leaves only 20% to develop and analyze the machine learning solutions that use it. 

And that’s the key to data confidence - for data to be used with any degree of certainty, it needs to be complete, sterilized, and manageable first. Not to mention safe. However, putting all these pieces together is typically a roadblock for most companies working with siloed data solutions.

The good news? Fortra DSPM puts all these pieces together. 

How Fortra DSPM Works

Fortra DSPM helps teams build trust in their data by ensuring they know that what they have is usable and secure. 

Unlike many DSPM pure-play vendors that focus solely on Discover and Classify, Fortra is coming off a two-decade streak of preventing information from leaving the network. Data security has been our forte for over 20 years, and our Data Loss Prevention (DLP) capabilities are primed and in use in Fortra DSPM. 

Explore how our comprehensive platform operates.

Discover: Get visibility into where your sensitive data lives; on-premises, in the cloud (AWS, Azure, Google Drive, etc.), in hybrid environments, in SaaS applications. 

• See how many fall into which data sharing type: internal, external, public, and organization-wide.

Classify: No more data scientists spending hours picking bits of information apart. Separate what’s essential from what isn’t automatically, and classify what is by context:

• IP

• Financial

• Personal Identifiers

• Medical

• Miscellaneous

• Etc.

Protect: Get data protection with an experienced, integrated data security portfolio that protects information based on classification.

• Protect both structured and unstructured data.

• Keep data safe in transit, at rest, and anywhere it goes; from endpoint to cloud.  

Gaining a Competitive Edge

Data is only “the next oil” to companies that know how to refine it and keep it safe. Get the most out of the information you take in every day with the DSPM tool that lets you collect it, classify it, and protect it - with confidence.