We have seen a steady stream of news items in recent years concerning online data breaches of commercial and government systems where large amounts of personal information has been compromised. It has become so prevalent that there are websites specialising in identifying whether an individual’s details are contained in one of the many caches of collected data available on the dark web and commercial monitoring services to alert individuals if someone is misusing personal data they have stolen from one of the many data breaches. As new Big Data marketplaces are created bringing together data from multiple sources to enable new product and service innovations, it’s clear more resilient security technologies are needed to ensure personal and all types of data are better protected.
Data breaches are just one of many forces that have brought Security Policy technologies to the forefront as a more comprehensive and reliable framework for protecting large and diverse data stores. Current security technologies are often a collection of mainly bottom-up measures (e.g. encryption, firewalls, identity management, authentication tokens, etc.), with an accompanying handbook of procedu
res to ensure their enforcement. Security Policy technologies takes a top-down approach of defining overall policies for how data is protected throughout a system, for every device, and for every user, and then automates the enforcement of these system level security policies. We no longer have to rely on someone following the handbook as the system itself ensures the security procedures are enforced and data is always protected.
Security Policy technologies takes a broader view of protecting data. Policies can be defined that are specific to different data stores, data types, and users, but also policies can encompass the notion of objects where objects can be what parts of the system are allowed to handle data, or what devices can access data, and can include even situational information such as what time, or from what place data can be accessed. This means that with Security Policies we can define specific restrictions that automate the assurance that a file with sensitive data is never left accessible or unencrypted, and we can fully prevent the data breaches that have become common place in today’s data-driven society.
Find out more about the advanced Security Policies and Context Sensitive Security innovation on our Cross-CPP website. The new Cross-CPP marketplace includes these new security technology advances and provide the most robust protection available for sensitive data.
Thanks for reading!
The Open Group Team