Information security departments including their staff at all levels face a daily battle of attacks and vulnerabilities and must constantly be deploying, monitoring, and managing both defensive and pro-active risk management solutions. These solution approaches must also be deployed throughout the organization at the network, host, application, authorization, people, and process levels.
In addition to the specific challenges of ensuring the availability and integrity of network, application, and host systems there is the additional challenge of protecting and auditing the actual use, handling, and exposure of individual data sets and assets.
Recently regulations have increased the burden on security departments with regards to data governance including requirements to disclose potential data thefts to data subjects.

The specific challenges facing information security staff as part of a comprehensive data security and governance program are:

• Managing access permissions for individual data categories including the audit trails of data queries to specific data sets.
  For instance Bob J. in Direct Marketing Group has permission to access California residents Personal Information or Carol M. in Research did access Non-Personally Identifiable (Redacted) Information for the purpose of research.
• Managing the stored condition, location and underlying infrastructure (Network, systems, and applications) that store and process data sets.
• Track, manage, audit, and enforce policies regarding the access, use, distribution, storage, and transfer of enterprise data assets between employees, divisions, partners, and applications.

The Align suite can assist information security departments in managing, enforcing, auditing, and supporting data governance programs by providing:

• The identification and classification (meta-tagging) features of the Align 3.0 Policy Development Environment and Align Data-Policy Transaction Management agents allow policies, audit logs, permissions, and inventories to be managed and tracked according to a classification ontology that meets any organization’s needs. This enables easy reporting, auditing, and managing of complex or simple data policies at the data level.
  For instance Telemarketing Group may not access United States Citizens Customer/Prospect Phone Numbers if Customer is on National Do-Not-Call List
• Use the Align suite to Profile, identify, audit, and enforce the security of data stores to ensure that policies are being enforced and can be audited where the data is located.
  For instance Customer Social Security Numbers may only be stored in encrypted form.
• Provide easy XML policy export statements to common security infrastructures leveraging existing security investments to enforce and support data governance program requirements including: Database DDLs, SAML, XACML, EPML, XRML, and other security standards.
• The Align Enterprise Service Center and Align Federated Policy Management solutions allow information security staff to collaborate, communicate, track, and be involved in practice approval workflows with a minimum investment of valuable resources or new technology assets.
  
  

If you would like to speak with a Synomos representative regarding Align please contact us.