Here we grow.
As AI drives the tech industry forward, gobbling up data to build from, there’s a worsening byproduct: data sprawl. The massive amount of data created is becoming unwieldy and difficult to control.
Unintended consequence or not, sprawl is a reality. Moritz Plassnig, CPO at Immuta, told IT Brew that there’s some upside to it, mostly in how much information is generated for on-prem use.
“Where the world is heading right now is in a direction where the more data you have, the better,” Plassnig said. “The higher quality your data is, the more proprietary it is; only you have it and nobody else.”
Growing pains. Still, there are risks. Andrew Bales, a senior principal analyst at Gartner, noted that the total amount of unstructured enterprise data has reached the zettabyte level—2 to the 70th power—something that brings with it a host of problems. Structured data is one thing. Unstructured data, undefined and unsorted, is another—and a threat vector.
“Organizations, simply put, haven’t been focusing on unstructured data security,” Bales said. “And so, with the volume of data that’s just proliferating, it’s causing all kinds of concerns for security leaders.”
For security leaders like CISOs, who are having to balance the needs of the organization with what’s doable, data sprawl is understandably intimidating. But Bales said there are ways to holistically monitor and manage the data, including classification and discovery efforts. Data access governance efforts are front of mind for CISOs.
“A lot of organizations need to reprioritize their efforts in data security, to reprioritize or to introduce data access governance as a primary priority,” Bales told IT Brew.
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Spread it around. Data sprawl leads to issues with security, as the more data that’s created leads to more data interaction at all levels of the organization. This, of course, results in more potential threat surfaces.
“What that means from a CISO security perspective is it’s a little bit of a nightmare,” Plassnig said. “Suddenly, instead of having maybe 500 data scientists or 1,000 data engineers that are accessing data, suddenly you have maybe 10,000 employees, or 20,000 employees, accessing data, because they are now technically capable of doing that.”
The role of AI in accelerating data sprawl makes projecting the future difficult, but it seems likely that as the technology continues to evolve, the data will grow. That means more work for data security professionals who will have an interest in taking care of data flow and sprawl. For some in the sector, that means working on migration; for others, keeping abreast of the threat surface will be a priority. It’s the latter concern that has Bales excited about the potential for the future, for CISOs and staff alike.
“Where we’re going to see continued efforts from a data security perspective is on some of the data flow analysis and data flow security controls that a lot of organizations are starting to play with, or at least developers within these organizations,” Bales said.