Unstructured Data

Abstract

Not so long ago, it was much easier to protect your data. Perimeter defenses were in place and meant something, and there were limited pathways to access your organization’s data. Data came in from IT-approved, enterprise-controlled devices and applications. It lived on your servers and in storage arrays. It was protected by walling off the outsiders and trusting your insiders. But IT environments have changed in a big way. Now, data is increasingly collected from applications, users, devices, cloud services, and connected hardware, with dwindling amounts of it under enterprise control. New forms of doing business demand easy access from the outside world. With the emergence of the cloud, your data, users, and applications may not even be on the inside anymore. And “insiders” with access to your data increasingly include third parties who don’t work for your organization at all. The approach to managing the granularity of access to this unstructured data at the file or application layer can be done with privileged access management.