Storage security is critical to overall security posture

With a robust storage security posture, organizations can provide their users with reliable and stable network access. However, to ensure this reliability and stability, organizations must protect sensitive data from possible exposure. As a first step, therefore, they must identify the data to be protected and the potential risks the business faces.

Organizations must understand that as the threats—both physical and online— keep evolving; they must fine-tune their storage security strategy to keep pace with the rapid changes. This can be made possible only when storage security is treated like a process rather than a one-time deployment of technology.

Plan and execute the storage security strategy

While building a storage security strategy, organizations must ensure that the investment on the storage security system must not exceed the value of the data it protects. Further, the security system should cause wastage of time and resources of an attacker such that the attempt to steal the data becomes financially worthless.

As the business grows, organizations must review the storage security practices and discard rules that are now obsolete. They must ensure that they only use tools and technologies that help them scale at the time of need. This will not only save time to scale up, but also eliminate over-stacking and information overload, which often leads to confusion.

Organizations must also invest in physical surveillance of their premises. The technologically advanced IP cameras, today, enable organizations to record and share the footage over the internet, which makes it easy to monitor the premises even remotely using smartphones. Further, these IP cameras set off alarms and send out email messages to the administrators when suspicious activity is caught.

Once the process is created, it’s time for execution and testing. Organizations must adopt a breach-ready mindset and regularly simulate such situations to prevent losses and remediate any network or device issues that may be detected. This will also allow organizations to revisit data classification and keep updating the data that needs enhanced security.

Follow the best practices

Organizations can consider building resilience in their security posture through hardening of the platforms. This means all the unnecessary services are disabled and latest patches and updates are applied as and when released by the vendors. Organizations must keep the operating systems up-to-date and build in redundancy by mirroring the stored media.

To further strengthen their storage security, organizations must follow the best practices. These include separating the network traffic from storage data, control access to storage devices, use intrusion detection systems that set off alarms when unauthorised access attempts are detected, encrypt both the data at rest and in transit, take regular backup of data, ensure physical security of the backed up data, and monitor the logs and permissions regularly.

Security is as good as the weakest link

All the investments and security best practices, however, will go in vain if the first line of defense has weak links. Organizations must, therefore, focus equal attention on educating the employees about the storage security policy and how to contribute to the overall security of the organization. They must conduct drills that help educate employees about access control, best practices to access network resources, and using strong passwords.

The article has been written by Neetu Katyal, Content and Marketing Consultant

She can be reached on LinkedIn.