As cybercriminals kept on finding new ways to attack businesses, the firewall has evolved with time to protect and secure their communications over the network. But now organizations are relying on data more than ever before. Advancements in technologies like IoT are helping organizations to gather an abundance of data about their customers, their processes, and their competitors. And, this data is helping them to provide enhanced services to their customers and stay competitive. And as companies rely more and more on data for their operations, monitoring just the network won’t be enough. As it is said, “The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, it is data.” The future of cybersecurity relies on securing data itself. Hence, organizations need to future-proof their cybersecurity with a data-first approach.

Data security is becoming more important and more complicated.

As mentioned earlier, organizations are gathering, storing, and transferring increasing volumes of data every day. And the potential impact of cyberattacks is increasing proportionally to the increase in the volume and importance of data. According to a report, data breaches exposed over 707 million records in 2015. And a more recent study suggested that data breaches exposed 4.1 billion records in the first six months of 2019. From these numbers of these studies shows that as the reliance of businesses in data continues to grow, the number of attacks and exposed data will grow as well. And as the numbers continue to grow in the future, so will the impact of every cyberattack on companies. The cyberattacks will have more devastating financial and reputational losses. And, that’s one of the reasons that cybercrime damages are expected to cost $6 trillion by 2021.

Based on a survey done, business operations are the most affected areas due to cyberattacks. And now, as companies are using data for almost all operative tasks such as segmenting their customers and providing personalized services to them, the impact of data breaches on business operations will be more significant. Hence, taking a data-first approach to fortify cybersecurity will become imperative. But as there is too much data moving around the enterprise network every minute, it becomes impractical for cybersecurity teams to monitor every bit of data.

Hackers are prepping for the future, are you?

By its very nature, cybercrime has to evolve for its existence. And this means that cybercriminals are constantly finding new ways to attack businesses and tweaking old ways to avoid detection. The origins of cybercrime are rooted in landline hacking. And it has now evolved to crypto-jacking. From malware to phishing, ransomware, and zero-day attacks, cyber attackers have always found new trends to get into the systems of companies and steal significant data. And that’s why organizations should start preparing for the future to stay well ahead of cyberattackers.

Some organizations currently take data security measures by encrypting data before transferring it to colleagues or external recipients. But, data encryption poses some significant limitations. For instance, when employees encrypt data, they must find a way to share the passwords or the keys of the encrypted data. And that might be shared through an unencrypted mode of communications such as emails. And, this provides an opportunity for hackers to get access to encrypted data. Also, when copied from one place to another, the encryption of data is lost. Hence there are chances that employees might unencrypt data unknowingly. Employing central management systems can help overcome such limitations of encryption.

Using a GajShield Firewall with Context-Sensitive Network Data Leak Prevention can help monitor every bit of data that leaves the organization’s perimeter. It can revoke or grant access to share sensitive data almost immediately. Since the Data Leak Prevention solution on the firewall at the gateway preemptively identifies and stops illicit sharing of data. The cybersecurity team can closely monitor data every time it is transferred from their organization to another, even when it is sent to and from using SaaS/Cloud applications. Therefore, it reduces the need to encrypt data individually. It also facilitates proper auditing and accounting of data, which is key for compliance.

Thus, present-day network or device-centric cybersecurity alone won’t be a foolproof solution against data exploitations, as data itself needs to be secured. And by following a data-first approach, businesses can ensure that they stay well ahead of cyberattackers in the fight with them. And to do that, they need cybersecurity devices that can help them seamlessly integrate a data-centric strategy with their existing enterprise networks. Companies also need Firewall Solution that can provide data leak prevention by monitoring data as it leaves the network using the web as well as SaaS/Cloud applications. Appropriate data leak prevention systems deeply inspect data level information, application data, control the inflow and outflow of data, and provide context-sensitive leak prevention, thereby eliminating cyber risks. As a result, by taking the data-first approach, businesses can future-proof their data and cybersecurity efforts.