8 Cloud Data Protection Platforms to Keep Your Data Nimble and Safe

Cloud data protection platforms are unified security solutions that protect data at rest, in motion, and within web applications.

Additionally, they provide data backup and disaster recovery services, hence enabling organizations to easily and quickly recover from disasters. 

As companies continue shifting to the cloud, they are facing various security and privacy challenges, which often leave their data vulnerable. Unlike an on-premise environment where IT teams have complete control of the infrastructure, it is much harder to control access and protect all the organization’s cloud-based data. 

Cloud data security, privacy, and safety challenges

The cloud provides a wide range of operational and cost benefits, including enabling remote workers to access office applications and data regardless of location and device. However, it comes with its own set of data security and safety challenges. 

Some of the factors that complicate security include;

• The organization may not know the exact physical location of its data and applications. Other than security threats, this puts them at risk of violating data protection regulations that vary from region to region.
• They do not know how the cloud providers store and secure the data.
• Cloud data security is a shared responsibility between the organization and the cloud provider.
• The organization does not have full control and visibility into the cloud provider’s infrastructure.
• Lack of adequate encryption may expose the data in transit or storage. Additionally, the data in the applications are also vulnerable, especially if there is no proper access control. 

Protecting cloud-based data

To prevent data losses, theft, cyber-attacks, and other online threats, IT teams should ensure that all the organization’s data is secure and safe. They should prevent exposure while complying with all necessary policies and regulations. 

Besides protecting the data against online threats, organizations should back up their information and prepare for disaster recovery. This ensures that the organization can quickly recover from a data loss, breach, ransomware, disaster, or other damage.

Organizations should also have strong security policies such as access control, authentication, governance, and others regarding accessing and using cloud data. The protection platform must then enforce the policies and ensure compliance with standard and organizational regulations. 

While the cloud protection platform service provider secures the data, the organization’s IT, and administrative teams should manage and control access to the content. As such, the success of a cloud data protection platform is based on shared responsibility between the organization, cloud, and data protection platform providers.

Features of cloud data protection platforms

A cloud data protection platform should prevent data theft and breaches and enhance compliance and data governance regardless of location. Some of the key features or capabilities include; 

• Proactively and automatically detect and mitigate security risks, ransomware, suspicious user behaviors, and other cloud-based threats.
• Allow administrative access control of the data in the cloud.
• Provide visibility into the file, folder, and user activities. And distinguish between usual and suspicious activities.
• Guarantees privacy by masking or encrypting the data
• Offer data backup and disaster recovery services. 

While there are so many products in the market, the best strategy is to look for a unified solution that combines data security, backup, and disaster recovery capabilities. To help you select the most suitable product for your environment, below are the best cloud data protection platforms.

Nightfall

Nightfall is a powerful, easy-to-deploy-and-use data loss and leak protection platform. The solution reduces data exposure risks that could make your information vulnerable, preventing threats and accidental data leakages.

Key features 

• Automatically and proactively protects data at rest or in transit, hence ensuring the security of the information for both the organizations and its customers regardless of its location or stage in the processing cycle. 
• It has an inbuilt machine learning feature to help you Identify, protect and manage the PII within the APIs, SaaS, and your cloud infrastructure.
• Integrates with a wide range of productivity tools and applications, including but not limited to Slack, Google Drive, Jira, GitHub, Salesforce, Zendesk, Twilio, Zapier, HubSpot, and more.
• Easy to deploy and manage. You can set up Nightfall in only a few minutes via APIs. Additionally, the lightweight data protection solution uses minimal resources hence little impact on the end users or network speeds.
• Automatically enforce compliance with various regulations, including HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA, PII, PCI, and others. 

Nightfall allows you to protect your credentials, prevent insider threats, reduce data leak risks and automatically respond to security incidents while providing you with relevant notifications and alerts.

BetterCloud

BetterCloud offers a powerful set of security tools that offer automated protection and management and in-depth insights to help you secure your cloud-based data.

Key features

• Automatically detect and respond to threats to ensure all the data is safe.
• Provides comprehensive and centralized security with granular controls. 
• Effective and fast security risk discovery capabilities allow you to detect and get alerts when there is unauthorized access or risky exposure of sensitive data.
• Granular controls allow you to configure when to get alerts based on default or custom settings. For example, you can get alerts when there is unusual access to financial information, personally identifiable information (PII), or any other custom-defined data.
• The platform provides immediate alerts in case of security threats or policy violations.
• User and admin access control only the resources they require to perform their roles.

This SaaS Management Platform (SMP) provides real-time threat detection, protection, automated remedial actions, and alerting.

Netskope

Netskope Zero Trust Data Protection is an effective solution that uses User and entity behavior analytics (UEBA), machine learning, and other technologies to provide comprehensive visibility and reliable data security.

Key features

• Identify and address network and organizational changes, technology shifts, new and evolving risks, and threats. It also checks compliance with existing and new regulatory requirements.
• Gain visibility into data activities, and establish the location, usage and management, and security of your cloud-based sensitive data. 
• Identify the user, user behavior, location, activity, and security risks on the cloud-based data.
• Enhances compliance with various requirements, including GDPR, PCI, HIPAA, GLBA, and others. It also allows you to create activity audit trails and compliance reports.
• Prevent data losses by detecting and responding to anomalies, such as unusual data download, movement, or usage. Limit access to data by applying granular, least-privilege, and other data access controls.

Netskope enables teams to easily mitigate security risks, define policies, classify data, respond to incidents, and more. 

Egnyte 

Egnyte is a comprehensive data privacy management platform that reduces exposure risks while enabling organizations to comply with a wide range of governance requirements. It allows you to manage company-wide data regardless of type, location, or type of cloud.

Key features

• Automatically protect data in the cloud applications, at rest (storage), or in transit, regardless of location. 
• Collaborate with teams while securely sharing cloud-based data. 
• Integrates with email systems such as Gmail and others, where it helps to identify and secure sensitive data. 
• Gain complete control and visibility over sensitive data across on-premise and cloud environments, and even restrict access based on a user’s geographical location. 
• Create and enforce privacy controls, improve audits, and reduce data exposure and privacy risks
• Scan the cloud-based data, and identify and classify personal information. Control access and use of personal data and keep a log of who accessed the sensitive data and for what purpose. 

This powerful data protection solution enables businesses to utilize and manage their cloud data securely.

DruvaData Resilience Cloud

DruvaData Resilience Cloud is a reliable SaaS-based cloud data protection platform that provides automated multi-layered security through friendly consumption-based pricing.

Key features

• Automated data security helps you to rapidly identify, respond and recover from attacks, ransomware, and other threats. 
• Provides visibility and advanced protection of the organization’s cloud data across multi-cloud environments
• Lower your data resilience costs by using a transparent and predictable consumption-based pricing model
• Highly flexible to meet your current and future data security and resilient needs. The flexible solution offered as-a-service allows you to auto-scale up or down depending on your present data security requirements.
• Provides you with better data access controls, including identity management and multifactor authentication.

The platform helps to reduce the attack surface and improve your data security posture and resilience. 

Arcserve Cloud Direct

Arcserve Cloud Direct is a flexible and scalable Backup as a Service and Disaster Recovery as a Service solution. It provides reliable and comprehensive cloud data protection. It assures you of data availability and protection against losses hence preventing downtimes and disruptions.

Key features

• Easy to set up and use scalable backup solution that protects your data and prevents disasters without requiring on-premise hardware.
• Allows you to automatically and easily transfer large amounts of data to offsite facilities.
• Uses third-party tools and SSL encryption to protect your data against ransomware and other cyber-attacks while creating multiple recovery points.
• Powerful cloud-native backup and disaster recovery solution.

Arcserve offers an asy-to-use interface with a wide range of features that enable teams to protect data while also utilizing its disaster recovery service.

Commvault

Commvault intelligent data services is one of the best cloud protection platforms that offers enhanced data security and recovery options. It protects against cyber threats, ransomware, and other threats across multiple clouds and on-premise environments.

Key Features

• Provides AI and machine learning-based in-depth insights that support data-driven decisions. This enables teams to improve efficiency, detect anomalies, improve data security, mitigate risks such as data breaches, ransomware, and others
• Offers rapid recovery from data breaches, loss, and malicious and ransomware attacks. 
• Improves security posture using strong authentication, hardware-based tokens, and other technologies.
• Provides an automated and proactive approach that speeds up the detection and response times hence preventing data losses, breaches, and other threats before they happen.
• Improve storage efficiency and disaster recovery through the use of Big Data File Systems, cloud-based object storage, and other technologies that speeds up the process while increasing capacity.

The intelligent data services improve data security, compliance, governance, and recovery at scale – whether on-prem, hybrid cloud or multi-cloud.

HYCU Protégé 

HYCU Protégé is a powerful Data Protection as a Service (DPaaS) platform that helps organizations easily protect their hybrid cloud data through a consumption-based model.

Key features

• Integrated Data Protection as a Service platform that provides protection, backup, and recovery of cloud data at rest or in motion. 

• Protect data against cyber-attacks, ransomware, data theft, and other compromises while enforcing policies and compliance – hence saving you money and time while preventing downtimes.  
• Fast and easy to set up and use security platform with an intuitive GUI hence suitable for all users, including those with average technical skills.
• Enhance disaster recovery preparedness by backing up your on-premise data between different locations within the same or different clouds. The platform also provides smooth fallback and failover options without the need to pay for dedicated costly DR services. 
• Secure data mobility that allows you to seamlessly move production workloads across different clouds in a multi-cloud environment without exposing your data to security risks.

The comprehensive data protection platform provides reliable cloud data security, mobility, backup, and recovery in single or multi-cloud environments. 

Conclusion

Cloud data protection platforms are security and safety solutions that combine data security, backup, and disaster recovery services. And depending on an organization’s infrastructure, the platform supports on-premise, public, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. 

Besides the protection, it should also comply with all data policies and regulations depending on the location, The data for one organization may be spread across different locations, and the protection platform must ensure that it complies with each region’s requirements.