Today, the cyber-security attack surface continues to expand even as network perimeters vanish. Cyber-attackers have evolved from pranksters into organized criminals whose sole focus is separating you from your money, your data,or both. But fear not breaches can be avoided–if you know what not to do.This Battle Card highlights some common mistakes other organizations have made.

Data security is on everyone’s mind these days, and for good reason. Although the number of data breaches in the first half of 2017 was about the same as the first halves of 2015 and 2016, the number of records stolen between January 1 and June 30, 2017 has exceeded all of 2016. And that’s not counting one of largest security breaches of all time, announced in September. Many factors are contributing to the increase in successful attacks – the erosion of network perimeters and increased attack surfaces offered by more complex IT environments, a growing use of cloud services and the new demands that places on security practices, and the increasingly sophisticated nature of cyber criminals – and the landscape continues to evolve.

Data security presents a complex challenge to organizations. The value of sensitive data, and particularly customer data, has increased exponentially over time, but with it comes an increase in potential liability and exposure. Successful enterprise security and compliance strategy needs to balance out: the rapid growth of data within organizations’ environments; the complexity of regulations and compliance across industries; and the threat of internal and external attacks.

To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with a Guardium implementation, Forrester interviewed three customers with multiple years of experience using Guardium. IBM Security Guardium offers a family of integrated modules for managing the entire data security and compliance life cycle, which is built on a single, unified infrastructure with a unified user experience. Guardium is designed to support and secure a wide range of data environments, including: databases; data warehouses; file systems; and cloud, virtual, and big data-based systems.

Five benefits of supercharging your data security and compliance efforts with a security-specific big data lake

This paper describes the roadblocks that organizations may face as they seek to take their data security and compliance efforts to the next level while juggling multiple priorities, including:

• The administrative demands imposed by the management of huge volumes of data.
• The need to retain those volumes of data over longer time horizons.
• The need to maintain or improve performance/speed of reporting.
• The need to provide direct access to data (“free” the data) to users with many different roles and responsibilities.
• The need to enrich audit data with other types of related security and compliance data while also performing complex analytics on this data to reveal new risks and/or insights.

The pages that follow will explore how organizations can take steps to address the hurdles above, and in doing so, reach new levels of efficiency and sophistication in data security and compliance management.

Software applications support the most sensitive and strategically important business processes of most enterprises. Yet application security is one of the most neglected fields of cybersecurity.

IT and business management typically have no visibility into the overall state of application security. Activities for assessing, prioritizing and remediating application vulnerabilities are ad hoc, fragmented and carried out at low levels in the IT security organization. Quality assurance and software development groups lack the knowledge and incentives to address critical vulnerabilities early in application development lifecycles, where testing and fixing vulnerabilities are most cost-effective.