Amer Deeba is a cybersecurity veteran who has been working in Silicon Valley for over two decades. He’s the co-founder CEO of Normalyze, an agentless data-first security platform that helps enterprises secure their data in multicloud environments. Before co-founding Normalyze, Deeba advised several cybersecurity startups and helped Qualys (News - Alert) get its 2012 initial public offering. 

Deeba’s chosen field comes from a deeply personal place. He told Authority Magazine, “In 2005, I witnessed a cyberattack happen in real time on an internet retailer who happened to be my customer. The impact of that attack in terms of damages it left behind and the aftermath to clean it up is still engraved in my memory. That event cemented my belief in the work I do to help customers prevent such expensive and unpleasant incidents.”

Over the years, Amer Deeba has noticed some common pitfalls that expose enterprises to cyberattacks. In a recent interview with independent information security website Help Net Security, Deeba discussed path data security and challenges with data visibility. 

Data Visibility and the ‘3 Vs’

One of the biggest challenges faced by security teams trying to secure that data stored in multicloud environments is the lack of visibility. It’s only logical that you can’t protect what you can’t see. This is why Deeba recommends gaining visibility of the data as the first step to secure data in multicloud environments.

He explained: “Some data discovery solutions give you only metadata, which is a good place to start, but comprehensive data classification based on sensitive content provides the additional context so you can focus on protecting what is important first.

“When it comes to data security, keep in mind the three Vs of data: volume, variety, and velocity. So, make sure the solution you are using can handle these three characteristics effectively.” Data visibility is a massive issue for enterprises. These days, almost all enterprises are trying to adapt to the vast proliferation of data, hybrid work environments, rapidly evolving regulations, and ever-expanding microservices. It’s becoming more and more difficult for security teams to keep track and as a result, cloud environments have multiple abandoned and shadow data stores with excessive access that can lead to costly data leaks. This is why data visibility should be the top priority for security teams. 

Enterprises can choose one of the many data discovery solutions that can help them gain visibility. However, Deeba suggests that enterprises should use solutions that provide comprehensive data classification based on sensitive content, in addition to data discovery, so that their security teams can prioritize which data stores need to be protected. 

Here are Amer Deeba’s 3 Vs: 

1. Variety: Your choice of cybersecurity solution should be able to classify structured and unstructured data stores across all public clouds. It should also be able to connect natively to scan and classify data without impacting the performance or privacy of data. 

2. Velocity: The speed with which data is generated and collected is called data velocity. The solution should be able to keep up with the velocity of your data and understand and classify your data structures timely and accurately.

3. Volume: Your solution should also be able to handle large volumes of data because the data being stored in multicloud environments is continuously increasing. It should also be able to manage its scale based on data discovery and classification needs.

Prioritizing Data

Prioritizing data is crucial for preventing unwanted data leaks. When prioritizing data, it’s important to assess data access points and block risky accesses first. These common errors that can lead to unauthorized data access:

— The infrastructure identity and access management layer has the wrong permissions.

— The infrastructure layer is accessible by vulnerabilities in the app layer.

— The network layer is misconfigured.

— The application layer has wrong authorizations.

— The network layer is accessible through misconfigurations in the IAM layer.

Data breaches caused by the reasons stated above usually occur because of two issues. First, the large volume of nodes in cloud environments and even more access paths create complexity. Second, the administrators responsible for maintaining security don’t have access to complete information. This is why enterprises need to focus on identifying valuable data stores and securing any assets that are associated with these stores. They should then limit privileged access to these data stores, and then limit access to each associated asset. 

Looking Forward

According to Deeba, data-centric cloud security tools will continue to evolve and become commonplace in the future. He told Help Net Security, “In the next few years, cloud security tools will evolve and make data be at the center of it … In addition, data provenance and usage will become an important part of privacy regulations and new tools will emerge that will certify correct usage of data based on provenance.

“Lastly, compliance programs will start using these tools on a continuous basis to provide ongoing monitoring and assurance in order to avoid violating privacy regulations and to secure data at rest and in motion.”

The proliferation of such tools will make the lives of security teams easier, as they will be able to visualize their data, allowing them to devise efficient security measures. These tools will also make it easier for enterprises to keep up with changing regulations and avoid heavy fines.

Deeba also predicts that data regulations will become more complex. For instance, regulations will include data provenance, which means that enterprises would have to show documented trails of where data was located and where it is moved. This will result in the evolution of cybersecurity solutions, which effortlessly perform monitoring and assurance of data in real time to prevent companies from breaching privacy regulations.

Future-Proofing With Amer Deeba’s Normalyze

Normalyze’s agentless platforms facilitate regulatory compliance and resolve many of the cybersecurity issues faced by today’s businesses. 

The platform has been designed to keep track of valuable data. It easily connects to all major cloud service provider platforms, such as GCP, Azure, and AWS. The platform also supports all kinds of structured and unstructured data.

It’s highly cost-effective and able to discover and classify data across all data stores, even those that are invisible to the security team. Its users are then presented with a visual breakdown of their data stores, which includes unmanaged, abandoned, and shadow data stores. Once data has been discovered and classified, users can limit unnecessary access to these data stores with a single click.

To make data access decisions easier, the platform also identifies risks by flagging anomalous user activity, data exfiltration, and excessive data permissions. Using the latest advances in data security posture management, for which the company recently obtained a patent, the platform can now also predict potential attack paths.