A survey from Rubrik Zero Labs reveals that 90% of IT and security leaders experienced cyberattacks in the past year, and 20% reported an attack every other week on average.

Those are merely attacks, but attacks have consequences. 30% reported on-premise data breaches, 28% a cloud or SaaS breach, and 26% reported ransomware.

And the crazy part – those are just the ones they know about. There are probably a lot more.

The only conclusion any rational person can arrive at is that whatever you’re doing isn’t working. It’s not that you need to do more of the same. You need to do something different. The current path is disintegrating before our very eyes. 90% of companies experience attacks because these attacks succeed. The defenses are simply ineffective and don’t work. There is no other way to explain these numbers.

What can you do?

First, you need to accept that defending the perimeter is a losing battle. It’s a battle we must fight, but a battle we will lose. So don’t over-invest in perimeter defense. From network security to endpoints, emails, AIM, and passwords – it’s a battle you probably already lost many times without realizing it. It’s not that attackers compromised every perimeter defense, but some of them were. Or maybe attackers got in another way.

The reality is that attackers constantly breach the perimeters of most companies. If not from the outside, then from an internal actor. In the Rubrik survey, insiders were responsible for 28% of attacks. Other estimates have them at about 20%. However, whether insiders or outsiders, attackers find their way in. There’s no stopping it, only slowing it down.

The obvious question is: “What can we do?”

One answer I often hear is “Nothing”. Just wait for the inevitable breach. It’s coming.

I don’t like that answer and refuse to accept it.

The other answer is data-centric security. It means focusing on protecting the data. If you cannot prevent malicious actors from penetrating your network, protect your data from everyone.

Since you have bad actors coming in from the outside and internal threats on the inside, everyone is a suspect. We have to protect the data against everyone.

Passwords can be stolen, individuals impersonated, and privileges abused. There is a never-ending list of attack vectors, and the bottom line is simple – you can’t trust any activity. You must evaluate every data access. Everything is suspicious.

That’s a great conclusion, but how can you do it?

With billions or trillions of accesses per month, that is not a job for individual human inspection. However, modern technologies can capture and evaluate all these accesses to find that needle in the haystack.

That statement sounds too good to be true, and it is to a degree. It is a generalization, and the details are far more complicated. But yes. It is possible to control all the database activity and all the application activity. Blue Core Research developed an array of technologies that can achieve that. Talk to us to know more.