Secure Data Architecture

Many organisations possess substantially more sensitive data than they realise. Without a coherent data management process, critical data naturally proliferates across databases, cloud services, shared drives, spreadsheets, backups, email archives, and personal computers. Without their knowledge, organisations may keep critical data in computer systems with limited security protections and no automated backups. Organisations may also retain far more data than they operationally need, a risk for both security and compliance.

A fundamental challenge of security is that information cannot be protected if its existence is unknown. An important component of Secure Data Architecture is therefore understanding what sensitive information exists within an organisation, where it resides, how it moves between systems, and who is able to access it. This requires auditing existing computing systems, migrating data away from unmanaged systems, and establishing human processes for data handling.

The strongest technology for protecting your data is cryptography. Modern cryptography works, but only if utilised with proper key management and processes - something many organisations lack experience with. We can teach your organisation how to make effective use of cryptography to protect your data, including how to produce and manage public and private keys. Properly applied, encryption can be used in almost any context that data is used.

Information requires protection throughout its entire lifecycle. This includes data at rest within databases and storage systems, data in transit between services, and data used by applications and users.

Depending on the environment, this may involve encryption, key management, pseudonymisation, data masking, secure backups, retention policies, secure deletion procedures, and controls designed to limit unauthorised access or exfiltration. The appropriate technical measures vary considerably between organisations, but the underlying objective remains the same: reducing the amount of harm that can result from the compromise of any single system or security boundary.

Finally, we address the end of the data lifecycle: retention, minimisation, and secure destruction. Data you no longer hold is data that cannot be breached, so disciplined retention and verifiable deletion - including crypto-shredding for encrypted stores - are security controls as much as compliance ones.

Protecting your data from exfiltration is a core concern for security, but not the only one. A ransomware attacker may simply wish to make your data unavailable - unless you pay up. More specialised attackers might wish to forge data on your systems. In cybersecurity, the core aspects of data security are precisely those aspects: confidentiality, integrity and availability - the CIA triad. In practice, this means ensuring data remains private, remains accurate, and remains accessible when it is needed.

We can set up systems for protecting the availability and integrity of your data as well as its confidentiality. We can use cryptographic signatures to help detect unauthorised modification of your data, and use multiple backups (on-site, cloud, cold storage) to minimise the chances an attacker can compromise all of them.

No security control is perfect. Secure Data Architecture assumes that individual systems, user accounts, or applications may eventually be compromised. Sensitive information should not be universally accessible simply because an attacker compromises a single system. Pervasive data controls are critical to this: by ensuring that ambient authority is insufficient to compromise critical data, attackers face further obstacles beyond simply gaining access to your systems.

Our Secure Data Architecture services are oriented towards understanding how sensitive information moves through an organisation and identifying opportunities to reduce the impact of future breaches. The objective is to ensure that if an attacker gains access to part of an environment, they are unable to gain access to everything that matters. Depending on the needs of the organisation, this may include:

• Data discovery and classification - Identifying sensitive information and understanding where it resides.
• Data flow analysis - Mapping how information moves between systems, users, and third parties.
• Architecture review - Assessing how sensitive information is stored, processed, and protected.
• Protection strategy development - Designing technical and procedural controls appropriate to the sensitivity of the information involved.
• Backup and recovery review - Assessing whether backup systems remain effective during security incidents.
• Implementation support - Assisting with the deployment of improvements through our Security Engineering and Systems Engineering services.