“Data transforms your business. Laminar secures it.”

Laminar prides itself in serving as, quote, “the first agile data security platform for what you build and run on AWS, Azure, GCP, Snowflake, BigQuery, and SaaS (News - Alert) applications.” At Laminar – i.e. a “laminar” flow in fluid dynamics, which is characterized by fluid particles following smooth paths in layers – its teams believe that data should be handled in a similar fashion. Organizations, per Laminar’s vision, should use the absolute minimum data they need for their business purposes, and via a flow of data that should remain clear, visible, and free from friction.

Last week, Laminar released the findings of a 219-respondent survey it conducted at two cybersecurity industry events: the RSA (News - Alert) Conference in April of this year, and InfoSec Europe in June.

Here are your long-story-short takeaways from Laminar’s findings:

• 63% of respondents now use cloud-native security tools to monitor and protect their data; this group recognizes that cloud data assets are different enough to warrant a specialized approach, one that goes beyond legacy solutions.
• 25%, however, still lack the abilities to fully monitor all data stores across their hybrid cloud infrastructures

It’s 2023, after all, and companies possess a wealth – as in, digital mountains’ worth – of data that’s used in all sorts of ways, one of which involves driving product and service innovations.

• 66% reported having smartly used data to innovate internally or for end users, and 58% have built or released brand-new cloud-based products or services since 2020-2021.

Cloud-native data security tools are important. They grant teams visibility into new data stores that are being created, and they enable better monitoring of activity that occurs within those assets. That’s important because (as mentioned) the growth of data in the cloud is essentially experiencing an exponential-grade explosion.

Unfortunately, teams that don’t have the full picture of their assets landscape – a lack of holistic and granular monitoring capabilities across all cloud data stores – appear to be experiencing a security execution gap.

That’s not good. Staying apprised of security activities and what can be contributed in order to shore up operations’ best-possible cloud data practices is a must.

So, what can be done?

Well, since 12% of respondents ended up experiencing a breach (as a result of having lagged behind when it comes to cloud innovations), new risks begin to boil over with every new deployment that enterprises release.

So, Laminar suggests a number of cloud-native data security solutions (that also lead to stronger privacy and governance practices) that provide businesses the asynchronous and autonomous discovery and classification tools for all of their cloud data across both managed and self-hosted data stores. Proper solutions analyze access, usage patterns and security posture while providing actionable, guided remediation steps to reduce data security risks.

As Laminar’s co-founder and CEO Amit Shaked put it:

“Enterprises are navigating an era of growing data risks and threats, and many teams are taking a second glance at their security solutions to see if they provide agile data security. These marry organizational agility with key controls to safeguard sensitive, regulated, and proprietary data in the cloud. Cloud-native data security solutions are designed to provide secure support for value creators’ activities while reducing undue security execution gaps. With the right solutions in place, organizations can truly gain more control over their data and more operational confidence in the process.”

Read more about critical gaps in security coverage and what actions can be taken in Laminar’s full State of Public Cloud Data Security Report here.