Strengthening cyber resilience with data sovereignty

Prioritizing data sovereignty can help your organization become more resilient in the face of growing cybersecurity challenges.

Cyber threats are increasing in severity and frequency, and organizations across a wide range of industries and sizes must stay prepared for outages and other incidents.

To protect against these risks, smart enterprises are increasingly embracing cyber resilience, which goes above and beyond cybersecurity practices and helps teams better anticipate, react to, and recover from cybersecurity incidents. This, in turn, ensures the long-term health and success of the business.

In this article, we’ll examine how maintaining data sovereignty helps organizations comply with data protection regulations and improve their overall cyber resilience posture.

Data sovereignty keeps data in control

Data sovereignty is the idea that data is subject to the laws and regulations of the nation where it is collected. For example, if a business uses cloud software with databases in the U.S., its data may be subject to U.S. laws even if the business itself is located in a different country.

All around the world, regulatory frameworks like GDPR and CCPA increasingly mandate data sovereignty requirements to help protect individuals’ data. For many organizations, achieving data sovereignty is a critical part of staying compliant with these regulations.

Moreover, maintaining ownership over their data is a highly effective way to ensure that they don’t just adhere to regulations but also keep their data secure. The policies and practices required by data privacy regulations are meant to increase visibility into who has access to data and limit how it’s being shared — which puts organizations in a better position to protect and control it.

How controlling your data boosts cyber resilience

Achieving data sovereignty can be accomplished in several ways, from opting for software hosted in your home country to ensuring that your data itself is housed on servers in your home country, a concept known as data residency. But for organizations that want to achieve the highest level of security, bringing your software on-premises as much as possible delivers the greatest data protection.

There are a number of frameworks that help organizations achieve cyber resilience, and the best choice might depend on where the organization is located (e.g., NIST CSF in the United States and NCSC CAF in the United Kingdom).

Regardless of which framework your organization uses, all of them have a few key cyber resilience functions in common, including anticipating threats and protecting data, detecting and responding to cyberattacks and outages quickly, and recovering from those incidents effectively. By opting for self-hosted software, organizations can leverage a number of advantages across key cyber resilience functions.

Protecting sensitive data from end to end

From employee conversations in your chat tools to security telemetry data in your monitoring software, your organization’s data is perhaps its most important — and therefore most vulnerable — asset. Supply chain attacks are increasingly common, and breaches that impact tools that have access to your data will impact your organization as well.

Controlling access to that data is essential for the long-term success of the business. Focusing on data sovereignty has one big advantage for security-sensitive businesses: It allows them to maintain complete ownership and control over their data at all times.

The flexibility to respond quickly

Cloud-based systems outages can take whole industries offline. When organizations rely on third-party software providers for software hosting, they’re at the mercy of those vendors’ timelines and resources to resolve outages and restore system access.

Self-hosted systems aren’t immune to outages, but they do give organizations more control when it comes to responding to incidents because they don’t rely on third parties for hosting. As a result, security teams have all the information and context around an incident from the moment it’s detected. While this means more responsibility for your team, it ultimately gives them the flexibility they need to take control over any type or severity of cyber incident.

Recovering from cyber incidents effectively

For security teams, data breaches and cybersecurity attacks aren’t truly over when incidents are resolved. Teams must analyze what happened, understand how to improve processes before another incident, and communicate with their stakeholders in a timely manner. Those organizations also have regulatory and compliance obligations and must provide data logs to auditors and other governing bodies.

Choosing self-hosted software gives security teams full access to all the information they need to dive into data from the incident moment by moment and later export any data required for reporting without any restrictions from software providers.

How Mattermost helps security teams achieve cyber resilience

Effective collaboration is at the core of any business’s operations, and Mattermost is a secure collaboration platform designed for security, IT, and other operational teams doing mission-critical work for their organizations. The platform is designed with high-stakes, sensitive workflows in mind, with features and functionality built to make sure that your most important data stays exactly where you want it to be at all times:

• Self-hosted deployment. Mattermost offers self-hosted deployment options that let organizations deploy their collaboration platform to on-premises servers and even air-gapped environments, ensuring their data never leaves their network.
• Granular access controls. Mattermost empowers admins to manage and moderate their multi-team deployments with the ability to configure channels to be read-only, restrict channel mentions and emoji reactions, and lock channels.
• Advanced compliance features. Mattermost offers compliance features that let administrators readily comply with requirements, including compliance export, eDiscovery automation, customizable data retention policies, and legal holds.

To learn more about how teams use Mattermost for security operations, DevSecOps workflows, and even mission operations, read this.