The cloud-first world has revolutionized technology, simplifying the way we work, and how we access and share information.
However, as your business adopts more cloud-based tools and hybrid work models, valuable data often moves beyond the secure boundaries of your organization, heightening its exposure and making it more challenging to monitor and protect.
This type of sensitive or confidential data, stored or shared outside of your organization’s authorized and managed systems, is known as shadow data. It can exist in unauthorized apps, cloud services, devices, or even personal email accounts—often without the awareness or approval of your IT or security teams.
There are many situations that can result in shadow data. In a hybrid workplace, employees accessing the web from remote locations, home offices, and corporate networks are exposing sensitive data every day. A common example is when well-intentioned employees move data from one system or format into another one that is easier for them to work with. Or when data is copied to a test environment or migrated to the cloud. If the unused data is never cleaned up and removed, it becomes shadow data. This increased exposure contributes to the growing threat of data breaches, posing a significant cybersecurity challenge.
How You Can Protect Your Business Against Shadow Data
Shadow data likely exists within your organization and will continue to grow. However, it can be managed and minimized with proactive strategies and solutions.
To mitigate the risk of data breaches caused by shadow data and other network threats, CISOs, CIOs, and other technology leaders are turning to a strategic framework known as Secure Access Service Edge (SASE). SASE combines multiple security solutions, including advanced Data Loss Prevention (DLP) tools, into one unified platform to simplify network management and enhance protection across the business.
By implementing a few straightforward security practices, you can greatly reduce the chances of users generating shadow data and mitigate its impact on your organization when it does occur.
Educate your users
The obvious first step is to educate your users about the risks of storing data outside your approved systems. This can be included as part of your broader security awareness training.
Control your sensitive data
A Managed SASE solution from Hughes allows your security team to set parameters around your sensitive data. If someone from inside or outside your organization tries to touch or move that data, your security team will know about it. This can prevent innocent mistakes and malicious threat actors from moving your sensitive data to other places or platforms where it doesn’t belong.
Data visibility
Crucial to minimizing shadow data is your ability to secure sensitive data across clouds, networks, email, and endpoints. Cutting edge data loss prevention technology can protect sensitive data, including personally identifiable information (PII), financial documents, medical records, credit ratings, trade secrets, and other types of intellectual property, regardless of where it’s stored.
Stop Shadow Data in Its Track with Hughes Solutions
Hughes offers advanced cloud DLP capabilities through its Hughes Managed SASE solution, stopping exfiltration of sensitive data and securing it consistently everywhere across the enterprise. Hughes DLP can be applied to outbound email, websites, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), CRM tools, and a wide range of commonly used applications.
Hughes DLP is designed to enable zero trust data protection, allowing an organization to control what data is deemed sensitive and prevent it from leaving the company’s network. For example, if a user attempts to email or send sensitive data to their own personal device through any means, DLP will prevent them from doing so, ensuring sensitive data will not leave the organization’s network without its authorization.
Key advantages of the Hughes solution include:
Comprehensive protection
The DLP provides comprehensive coverage and unified data protection policies for every location where data is stored, used, or transferred. The centralized cloud service is delivered across network in-line, SaaS at-rest, SaaS in-line, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), private applications in the data center and in the cloud, branch offices, the remote workforce, email, and on users’ endpoints.
Precise and reliable
The solution provides accurate and reliable detection of all sensitive data in any form with the lowest degree of error possible. This is achieved through a broad set of detection technologies and advanced classification tools, several thousands of data identifiers and file types with contextual detection policies, highly scalable exact data matching (EDM), fingerprinting of structured and unstructured documents, machine learning (ML)-based image classification, advanced optical character recognition (OCR), and AI/ML data classifiers to aid data discovery and identification.
Easy-to-use
The solution uses a modern cloud architecture that doesn’t require on-premises components, making it easy to deploy and maintain with a low total cost of ownership (TCO). Centralized policies are delivered consistently everywhere the service is enforced. Always-on and up-to-date protections replace the need for lengthy manual software updates typical of legacy DLP solutions.
Ask Yourself These Five Questions
Managing the large number of tools necessary to safeguard sensitive data can be overwhelming for any business, but especially for mid-sized companies who may have limited resources. The first step is to ask yourself these five questions:
- Does your business have a cloud-first strategy?
- Does your business use SaaS tools such as CRM, ERP, and other business applications?
- Are your employees accessing corporate data from home and public networks?
- Does your business use file sharing, collaboration, and communications tools like Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft Teams, and Webex?
- Does your business store and share data that is highly regulated?
If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, it's time to seriously evaluate how well your business is protected from shadow data.
Partnering with a trusted managed services provider like Hughes can ensure the deployment, management, and support of a comprehensive DLP system, and all the crucial security elements necessary to keep your sensitive data, network, and users safe from cyberattacks. Hughes can also collaborate with your existing security team, helping to enhance their efficiency and overall impact. Click here to learn more.