Blog
March 19, 2024
How to Mitigate the Risks of Sensitive Data Sprawl
Security & Compliance,
Data Management
Mitigating the risks of sensitive data sprawl is an uphill battle. Cyber threats are always evolving, and new vulnerabilities emerge rapidly. This challenge grows even bigger with the increase in sensitive data spread across organizations. Data security teams now have more data than ever to protect.
Allowing sensitive data to spread unchecked is:
- Unsustainable in the long term.
- Dangerous in the short term.
The solution? Start by recognizing the problem and understanding what causes it.
What is Sensitive Data Sprawl?
Sensitive data sprawl refers to the uncontrolled spread of sensitive information across different systems. Often, this data goes beyond the organization to trusted third parties like offshore teams.
It includes:
- Personally identifiable information (PII).
- Financial records.
- Intellectual property.
- Health records.
Enterprise leaders are aware of this problem. A report from Perforce Delphix found that 75% of leaders saw sensitive data in non-production environments increase over the last year. Another survey by RiskStrat Advisory showed that over 90% of CISOs admitted innovation projects were expanding the spread of sensitive information.
Sensitive data often ends up in insecure locations, such as:
- On-premises servers.
- Cloud storage services.
- Laptops or mobile devices.
- Third-party applications.
This sprawl makes it hard to track and secure sensitive information, which increases the risk of:
- Unauthorized access.
- Data breaches.
- Violations of privacy laws.
What Causes Sensitive Data Sprawl?
Sensitive data sprawl is caused by the growing number of non-production environments — such as development, testing, or analytics environments. These environments often contain replicas of production (live) data, and much of it is sensitive.
Here’s why non-production environments are growing:
1. Adoption of Agile and DevOps
Agile and DevOps practices require speed, which means multiple environments for software development and updates.
2. Microservices and Modular Systems
Modern software relies on smaller, independent systems, requiring separate environments for different project teams.
3. Increased Testing Focus
More complex software and a greater emphasis on quality mean software teams need environments for automated and performance testing.
4. Cloud and Virtualization
Cloud platforms make it easy to create multiple environments quickly and at lower costs.
5. Compliance and Security Testing
Regulations demand environments that mimic real-world systems for testing security and compliance.
6. Continuous Iteration
Frequent testing and updates require parallel development and testing processes.
7. Remote and Distributed Teams
More remote employees mean a need for accessible environments.
8. Offshoring and Outsourcing
Companies rely on third-party teams, which require local copies of systems and data.
9. Complex Integrations
Testing integrations with external APIs often needs extra environments that don’t impact live systems.
The Risks of Sensitive Data Sprawl
Sensitive data sprawl increases the risk of:
- Data breaches from poorly secured environments.
- Non-compliance with privacy laws like GDPR, HIPAA, or CCPA.
It also creates operational headaches:
- Harder to track and secure data.
- Higher costs for managing and protecting sensitive data.
- Reputation damage caused by mishandling information.
Why It Matters
Businesses must address sensitive data sprawl to protect sensitive information, reduce risks, and maintain customer trust.
The 2024 State of Data Compliance and Security Report
91% are concerned about the expanded exposure footprint that's resulted from sensitive data sprawl. Find out what you can do about it when you get the insights from 250 global leaders in this report.
How to Reduce the Risks of Sensitive Data Sprawl
There are two main ways to address the risks of sensitive data sprawl effectively. These include governance and technical measures to protect your sensitive information.
Governance Measures
1. Find Sensitive Data
The first step is to locate and understand where sensitive data is stored across your organization. Use tools designed to discover this data on your networks, devices, and cloud services. These tools can label the data based on sensitivity, making it easier to control and protect.
2. Create Data Governance Rules
Set clear data governance rules for handling sensitive data — how it’s shared, stored, or deleted. Make sure everyone in the organization knows these rules and follows them.
3. Train Your Team
Employees must understand the importance of data protection. Provide training to teach them the best practices for managing sensitive information.
4. Audit Regularly
Conduct frequent checks to ensure your organization complies with the set rules and regulations. Regular audits catch gaps in security before they become major issues.
5. Manage Vendor Risks
If third-party vendors handle your sensitive data, assess their security measures. This ensures they align with your own security standards.
Technical Measures
1. Control Who Can Access Data
Use strict access controls like role-based access. Review permissions regularly to ensure only authorized personnel can access sensitive information.
2. Mask and Anonymize Data
Data masking replaces sensitive details with fake data, while data anonymization alters it so it cannot be traced back to its source. These methods help protect the data while it's in use.
3. Encrypt Important Data
Encryption protects data by converting it into a secure format. Even if someone accesses encrypted data improperly, they can’t read or misuse it. Encrypt data both when stored (“at rest”) and while being sent (“in transit”).
4. Use Tools That Prevent Data Loss
Data loss prevention (DLP) tools monitor data transfers and help stop unauthorized sharing or leaks.
5. Secure Storage Options
Use secure storage solutions built to protect data. These tools are designed to prevent leaks and keep your information safe.
6. Protect Endpoints
Your laptops, desktops, and mobile devices must be secured. These devices are common entry points for accessing sensitive data, so using strong endpoint security solutions is essential.
The Scalability Problem
A major challenge in reducing sensitive data sprawl is scaling security measures as the volume of data grows. Many current tools can limit risks but don’t prevent sprawl. This increases cost and effort over time.
Here are some areas this challenge impacts most:
- Access controls: Managing permissions for more users and systems adds complexity and costs.
- Regular audits: Monitoring more data locations requires additional skilled labor and tools.
- Data storage: Sensitive data spreading across multiple environments increases storage costs and security needs.
- Endpoint security: Devices with sensitive data are expensive to protect — and regulations demand high standards for their security.
- Vendor management: The more third parties handling sensitive data, the greater the risks and management overhead.
Most businesses operate within tight budgets and limited resources, so a solution that can scale to handle more data is critical.
A Scalable Solution for Sensitive Data Sprawl
That's why many enterprises are turning to Perforce Delphix. Delphix offers the best way to reduce risks of sensitive data sprawl at scale.
Consider Choice Hotels International. According to CIO Brian Kirkland:
“One of the biggest ways we're using Delphix is really in the masking technology. Our ability to really control and protect the data and make sure that it's secure and make sure that that people aren't making mistakes is paramount number one. We've got to make sure that we're doing the right thing when it comes to protecting PII data and PCI data and make sure that our environments are clean. We use the masking in order to protect those lower environments across all of our assets.”
Or consider StoneX, a Fortune 500 financial services company. According to Anup Anand, Global Head of Infrastructure & Operations:
“We spent a lot of work building a CI/CD pipeline with a focus always on security. We have automatic processes to detect sensitive data within our databases and make sure that we're applying the correct data scrubbing before provisioning to non-live environments. With one view, we can see where all of our non-live environment [are] and prove to auditors that we’re scrubbing data appropriately.”
Finally, consider the world leader in Human Capital Management solutions, ADP. According to Vipul Nagrath:
“Our past process of moving data around from one environment to another could be quite onerous at times. Maybe it would take a day, or many, many hours for small clients, but it might take a day or multiple days for very large clients. By utilizing Delphix, we copy in place, which actually saves us a lot of storage. But the other part is we are able to mask the data. So the sensitive data that I can't have every developer looking at, they're not seeing. Our time to market is now faster than it used to be in the past and it's higher quality.”
Mitigate Sensitive Data Sprawl Risks with Delphix
Delphix delivers data masking capabilities that enable businesses to mitigate risk and eliminate barriers to fast innovation. Delphix automatically discovers sensitive data values including names, email addresses, and payment information. Then, it transforms sensitive values into realistic, yet fictitious ones — while retaining referential integrity.
Related blog >> What Is Delphix?
Comply with Privacy Laws and Protect Against Breach
With Delphix, teams centrally define masking policies and deploy them across the enterprise for compliance with key privacy regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and PCI DSS. And because masking transforms sensitive information, Delphix neutralizes risk of breach in non-production environments that contain vast amounts of data that must be protected from cyberthreats.
Integrate Data Masking and Data Delivery
The Delphix DevOps Data Platform combines data masking with virtualization to deliver compliant data to downstream environments for development, testing, analytics, and AI. Masked, virtual data copies function like physical copies; but they take up a fraction of the storage space and can be automatically delivered in just minutes.
Get Started with Data Masking
Try Delphix data masking and see how Delphix enables fast, automated compliance. Request a no-pressure compliance demo today. You’ll find out why industry leaders choose Delphix to mitigate data risks and accelerate innovation.