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Imperva extends Data Security Fabric to enterprise data lakes on AWS
Thu, 28th Jul 2022
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Imperva has announced that its Imperva Data Security Fabric (DSF) now provides data-centric protection and compliance for enterprise data lakes built on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

According to a statement, Imperva is reinforcing its commitment to securing data and all paths to it by allowing AWS customers to secure their data with one comprehensive platform, leveraging a unified security model across Amazon Aurora, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Athena, and AWS CloudFormation without requiring any changes to their existing data infrastructure.

Many security teams have gaps in their resources and domain expertise required to ensure their data lake meets organisational compliance and security policies, Imperva states.

In particular, organisations must be able to simultaneously identify when a compromised user accesses sensitive data, while also preventing data from being stolen by malicious insiders.

These gaps can mean that organisations must choose between limiting the data they store in a data lake, and putting themselves at risk of non-compliance, or in the worst-case scenario, a data breach.

Imperva Data Security Fabric addresses these challenges by first discovering data lakes defined and catalogued using services such as AWS Lake Formation and AWS Glue.

It identifies sensitive data stored across services such as Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon RDS by leveraging its internal data classification engine, or by importing classification scans from Amazon Macie, to identify where sensitive data is stored.

Imperva DSF collects data access logs from services like Amazon CloudWatch to audit when a user is accessing raw data files stored in Amazon S3 or executing analytic queries against the data using services like Amazon Athena, or Amazon EMR.

Imperva DSF includes User Entity Behaviour Analytics (UEBA) models that can identify suspicious data access patterns, such as excessive access to sensitive records, the use of privileged service accounts by interactive users, and suspicious network connections. This helps organisations automatically identify and detect potential data breaches without the need for specialised data security analysts.

Finally, with Imperva DSF, security operations teams can create playbooks to automatically mitigate threats using native AWS features like security groups or revoking user access using AWS IAM, Imperva states. This ensures organisations stay in compliance while also helping to prevent data breaches.

From one dashboard, Imperva DSF delivers a broad range of data security capabilities - including data discovery, classification, monitoring, access control, risk analytics, compliance management, security automation, threat detection and audit reporting.

According to the company, this makes it easier for customers to protect the migration of sensitive data, including Personally Identifiable Information (PII) such as customer names, email addresses, phone numbers, and gender, and adhere to privacy regulations, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Tens of thousands of organisations build data lakes on AWS and configure AWS Lake Formation, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) policies to secure access to them.

Imperva DSF leverages services like AWS Lake Formation and AWS Glue to discover data lakes, monitor how users query and access stored data, and detect and prevent malicious user access and data leakage incidents. Imperva DSF also safeguards critical data workloads across all of their databases, file repositories, data warehouses, multicloud, and data lake environments.

Imperva Data Security Fabric can be deployed directly in any AWS Regions using pre-built AWS CloudFormation templates. Once deployed, Imperva DSF will begin discovering and monitoring data lakes.

Imperva SVP and GM data security Dan Neault says, "AWS allows organisations to quickly and securely build solutions that help them to reach new markets and deliver new services to end users. Imperva Data Security Fabric gives organisations building data lakes on AWS a streamlined experience for securing data, and confidence that their data lakes are in compliance."