For information on Zscaler Data Protection, check out our new guide.
Data protection is defined as the process of safeguarding your important and sensitive information from corruption, compromise, or loss. There was a time when that amounted to preventing data from being moved inappropriately—either intentionally or accidentally—which could be handled with a good data loss prevention (DLP) solution. After all, your applications and servers were in the data center and your employees were mostly on the network. All you had to do was monitor the outbound gateway for data and destinations that met certain conditions.
Fast forward to 2020. Most of your apps and data, including your sensitive customer data and your company’s IP “crown jewels,” had been migrated to cloud platforms. Then, right around March, all your office workers were suddenly sent home. A simple DLP solution, even if you’d added a cloud access security broker (CASB), was suddenly nowhere near adequate to give you control over the massive amount of data now distributed across your cloud apps.
Why? Traditional DLP and CASB solutions were designed for specific functions, but they lack the broad data protection capabilities you need with users connecting to your data from everywhere, including unsecured networks and public Wi-Fi, and they fail to prevent misconfigurations in the cloud, which are one of the most common causes of data exposure. With SaaS and multicloud environments, it’s become far too easy for data to be inadvertently exposed due to a lack of visibility. There are other challenges as well:
- Your data is everywhere: Data is spread across clouds, SaaS, on users’ devices, and in the data center.
- Your data is encrypted: Connections to applications are encrypted and data exposure is largely hidden.
- Your compliance is unknown: Application deployment and usage are spread across locations and groups making unified assurance impossible.
To address these challenges, you need a comprehensive data protection strategy that gives you the big picture of your environment—every user, application, and device that is accessing or moving your data. If you tried to build a solution with point products, you would end up with massive complexity and a disjointed view of your environment. Instead, you need an integrated solution that provides unified visibility and policy enforcement, with capabilities that include DLP with Exact Data Match and CASB (inline and out-of-band) as well as browser isolation, cloud security posture management, SaaS security posture management, and SSL inspection at scale, so you can:
- Follow and secure users off-network without any performance degradation: A purpose-built SASE architecture delivers comprehensive data protection as part of a large, integrated platform built on a high-performance inline cloud distributed across 150 global data centers.
- Inspect all of your encrypted traffic: The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange inspects ALL SSL traffic for data exposure with unlimited inspection capacity per user.
- Gain visibility into compliance: Zscaler Data Protection allows you to easily maintain compliance by scanning your SaaS, Microsoft 365, and public clouds for violations and misconfigurations.
- Reduce risk with inline enforcement: Zscaler sits inline so it can block sensitive information before it leaves your network—instead of being limited to damage control after data has been compromised.
- Simplify data protection with one platform and one policy: Secure all your cloud data channels—data in motion, at rest, and across endpoints and clouds—with one simple, unified platform—the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange.
Today, almost a month into 2021, the questions about an eventual return to the office persists, though most agree that we are likely to see a “hybrid” workforce with employees in the office some of the time and working remotely the rest of the time. In other words, work-from-anywhere is here to stay. This reality has accelerated the migration to public clouds and services that simplify access.
That means it’s time to rethink your data protection strategy and search out a data protection solution that prevents data loss, helps maintain strict compliance, automatically remediates cloud misconfigurations, and has the visibility to follow your users and data off-network. All without adding complexity or hindering performance for users.
Learn more about evolving your data protection strategy to address the challenges of today’s cloud-first, work-from-anywhere environment with Zscaler in our latest ebook, Safeguarding Your Data in a Work-from-Anywhere World.
