Governments are addressing cybercrime with better policies and tighter legislation, but it is up to businesses to take precautions to protect their organization’s data. Cybercrime is a growing threat. Recently, the European Union ruled on the Cybersecurity Act, calling for better security measures globally. Norton’s Cyber Safety Insights Report 2021 shows that the US and India alone account for over 300 million attacks so far, and 72% of Indians have experienced a cyber threat at least once. Roughly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are produced every day, calling for improved measures for the use and protection of this data.
Secure Enterprise Data with Real-Time Processing
Data is the foundation of company records. Organizational data includes a collection of consumer data, financial data, employee data, and IT data. This can be alluring for cybercriminals to use in cases of identity theft, and financial scams, to share mass spam messages or gain access to sensitive information. Companies should have basic database security requirements to ensure that the right people have the appropriate level of access to the required data.
As simple as the needs are, meeting these requirements involves complex procedures like strict mechanisms to authenticate the right user, limiting one’s access to authorized data, encrypting sensitive information, and auditing (or logging) various activities that occur in the given database.
As we realize the importance of investing in strategies to safeguard existing data, how do we address the challenge of securing enterprise data while using it in real-time processing?
As technological developments are moving us towards a world where data is the currency of the moment, enterprises are investing in better strategies to manage and process their data while achieving speed and keeping the analysis safe. Data in enterprises is processed for various purposes – to provide service to customers, derive business insights, predict future trends, track growth, and much more. Some of these can also be classified as information. Such data in the wrong hands can lead to an unanticipated crisis. Investing in a good Cyber Security System and a superior real-time database is a must have in today’s environment.
Key Approach to Security
Enterprises require management systems to protect their operational data from unwanted access and to keep track of significant system events including successful updates to classified business data, successful efforts to circumvent user authentication, and more.
With today’s technology and services, businesses may expand to billions of transactions without compromising on key security measures and while gaining access to real-time insights more quickly than ever before. Such Security procedures ensure that sizable amounts of data are protected while being processed.
Authentication
Authentication is the process of verifying a user’s identity when they seek to access a system, by asking them to log in using a legitimate ID and password that an administrator has generated and provided. To designate valid users and give the database management system (DBMS) the go-ahead to integrate its security checks with the stated service, this process can be completely internal to the system, requiring the administrator to create an account for each database user.
For managing large numbers of users that require access to a variety of different company applications and services, outsourcing user creation and administration might be very practical. One well-liked method for keeping track of a centralized database of user names and passwords for many applications and system functions is the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).
Authorization
Authorization guarantees that users have access to the necessary data while preventing them from obtaining anything more. Only the resources that are allowed for them to view and utilize are accessible to authenticated users. Administrators frequently assign a set of privileges or permissions to a specific user; these privileges keep track of that user’s ability to read from or write to a specific collection of data or to perform tasks related to a given database, such as creating new user accounts, altering configuration settings, creating or deleting database objects, etc.
Encryption
Encryption is the process of ensuring classified or sensitive data from being accessed by an unauthorized user. Safeguarding it from being compromised can be done by encoding it. Subsequent data processing requires a decryption process, often involving a key/code; without which the data’s content cannot be deciphered.
It is imperative to consider Transport-Layer Security (TLS) encryption services while dealing with a clustered computing environment, which protects data as it flows over the wire between server nodes as well as between the client and the server. Additionally, some firms may require encryption for data at rest, the data stored on a traditional hard disk or in non-volatile memory, such as a solid-state drive (SSD).
Audit Trail
An audit trail is a post-activity examination of the system events that were captured and defined by the administrator. This could include successful or failed attempts to read or write data into the system. Each recorded event often contains several bits of data, such as the event’s nature, a timestamp, user information, the event’s site of origin, and more.
Accountability is made possible via audit trails, which also enable problem analysis and help businesses identify potential risks and intrusions. A database platform provider must provide a way to choose specific activities to track since audit trails add extra I/O overhead to user transactions and other processes.
Checking The Three ‘S’s On Your List – ‘Speed’, ‘Security’ & ‘Scalability’
Through the aforementioned steps, enterprises can ensure the right access of data to the appropriate users and avoid any misuse of information. Specifying user permissions restricts misplacing classified information. It is important to understand that data security not only involves the safekeeping of available and stored information but that this needs to take place in real-time, as data comes in and while it is being used to derive insights in real-time. It is now possible for enterprises to not only invest in a processing platform to act across millions of transactions but also simultaneously process data in real-time and protect this data from being accessed by an unauthorized user.
A platform with the ability to handle a per-server transaction rate of at least 1 million transactions per second (TPS) can help reduce server usage, leading to significantly lower TCO. This savings can be used to invest in secure safety systems in enterprises that handle large amounts of data.
Real-time processing directly influences cybersecurity in an organization, while safely processing massive amounts of data without misplacing or misinterpreting it. Through steps – Authentication, Authorization, Encryption, and Audit Trailing – it is possible to add an extra layer of security.
By Aveekshith Bushan, Vice President – Asia Pacific and Japan at Aerospike
