Data breaches can have devastating consequences, leading to financial losses, reputational damage, and even legal repercussions. Traditionally, endpoint security has been the primary line of defense against cyberattacks. However, with the growing numbers of data breach, a new approach called startpoint security is gaining traction.
What is Endpoint Security?
Endpoint security is a widely adopted data security strategy that focuses on safeguarding hardware devices such as laptops, desktops, disk drives, smartphones, and tablets – or software systems like entire databases or applications – from unauthorized access and malicious software.
Imagine these devices or databases as entry points into your organization's network – endpoints. By securing these endpoints, you aim to prevent attackers from gaining a foothold within your system and compromising the data within them.
What is Startpoint Security?
Startpoint Security, as conceptualized and implemented by IRI, focuses on safeguarding data at its creation point—right where it originates within databases or files rather than at the broader device or network level. This approach is pivotal in a world where endpoint data breaches are increasingly common, affecting not just individuals but large organizations and their stakeholders.
Core Principles of Startpoint Security:
Proactive Protection
Unlike reactive security measures that focus on endpoints, Startpoint Security aims to secure specific data in specific places. This includes the initial points where data is created, stored, processed, and eventually distributed across networks.
Data-Centric Approach
At its core, Startpoint Security revolves around data-centric strategies such as data masking. By directly protecting the data rather than just the devices or networks it travels through, Startpoint Security ensures that any compromised data remains unintelligible and secure. As importantly, this approach allows you to deploy multiple methods; i.e., different masking functions on different kinds of data so that even if one is compromised, the rest are not.
Efficiency and Usability
Implementing security measures like encryption or data masking directly at the data source is not only more efficient but also maintains the usability of the non-sensitive surrounding data. This allows businesses to continue their operations without disruptions caused by broad security measures that may render all data inaccessible or unusable.
Enhanced Compliance and Security
With Startpoint Security, organizations can better comply with privacy laws by maintaining detailed logs of how data is accessed and protected. This granularity extends to who can view or alter the data, significantly enhancing security and accountability.
Examples of Endpoint Security vs. Startpoint Security
The contrasting strategies of Endpoint and Startpoint Security can be illustrated through these examples:
Endpoint Security
A large corporation implements Endpoint Security across its network of mobile devices and laptops. This includes installing antivirus software, enabling firewalls, and deploying Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) systems to monitor and respond to threats. While this strategy effectively blocks many external threats, it relies heavily on detecting issues after they have reached the network or device.
Startpoint Security
In contrast, Startpoint Security might involve the same corporation implementing data masking solutions to protect sensitive information at the most granular level, perhaps even from the moment it is generated.
For example, when personal identifiers are entered into a database, they can be immediately encrypted or masked in the production or test schema with a real-time data masking solution. This ensures that even if the data is improperly accessed or extracted, it remains protected and incomprehensible without the appropriate decryption keys or permissions.
Benefits of Endpoint Security
Protection from Advanced Threats
Endpoint security solutions are equipped with advanced technologies such as next-generation antivirus (NGAV) and endpoint detection and response (EDR), which provide robust protection against sophisticated malware, ransomware, and zero-day threats. These systems are designed to identify and neutralize threats before they can cause harm, thereby enhancing the overall security posture of an organization.
Enhanced Compliance and Data Protection
By ensuring that only authorized users and devices can access network resources, endpoint security systems play a crucial role in protecting sensitive data and helping organizations comply with regulatory requirements. This protection extends to preventing data breaches that can result in significant financial penalties and reputational damage.
Remote and Mobile Security
With the increase in remote working, endpoint security solutions are more important than ever. They ensure that mobile devices and remote work environments are secured, protecting against vulnerabilities that could be exploited outside the traditional office perimeter.
Benefits of Startpoint Security
Proactive Data Protection
Startpoint security involves finding and protecting specific items (or classes) of data, when or after they are created in their source(s). By securing sensitive data at rest, organizations can prevent unauthorized access and manipulation, ensuring that data remains intact and confidential throughout its lifecycle.
Efficiency in Data Handling
By applying security measures such as encryption and masking directly at the data source, Startpoint security not only secures the data but also maintains its usability for legitimate purposes. This approach is less resource-intensive compared to methods that secure larger data sets indiscriminately.
Enhanced Compliance and Reduced Risk of Breaches
Startpoint security simplifies compliance with data protection regulations by ensuring that sensitive data is secured in managed ways at any point in its lifecycle. This preemptive approach significantly reduces the risk of data breaches and their associated legal and financial repercussions. And because different masking functions can be applied to different data classes or even specific data items, finding a ‘key’ to unlocking one does not help an attacker with any of the others. Contrast this with endpoint security where, if a hard drive or database is decrypted, everything is open.
Startpoint Security Tools
Startpoint security focuses on protecting data at the item level, often known as PII data-at-rest, to reduce risks of unauthorized access and ensure compliance with stringent data protection regulations.
Data masking and encryption are essential techniques for securing personally identifiable information (PII) and other sensitive data directly at its source. These functions utilize methods like format-preserving encryption and pseudonymization to maintain data’s usability for analytics and marketing while ensuring it remains protected.
IRI FieldShield
FieldShield, a key element in the IRI Data Protector suite, is specifically designed to provide startpoint security for data at rest in structured sources like relational databases and flat files. FieldShield can identify (classify) sensitive data, mask it, and score it for re-identification risk. By supporting consistent deterministic masking rules, FieldShield users can also preserve the referential integrity of masked data across distributed environments.
IRI DarkShield
DarkShield, another component of the IRI Data Protector Suite, effects startpoint security by classifying and masking sensitive data in structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data sources. Its granular search logs can also be used to deliver specific PII values for Data Subject Access Requests (DSAR) in compliance with data privacy laws like the GDPR and DPDP Act.
Implementing comprehensive startpoint security can be intricate. IRI provides expert support to integrate its startpoint security tools seamlessly into existing infrastructures. This includes support for deployment, configuration, and tuning to ensure solutions are customized for each organization’s unique data protection goals.
