Auditing Access to Critical Data

Recording who accesses what data, when and for what purpose is the basis for detecting both insider abuse and an external breach already underway. Auditing access to critical data means capturing detailed read, modify and export logs on the most sensitive repositories, and reviewing them proactively, not just consulting them after an incident occurs. This requires defining in advance which patterns are anomalous, such as a user accessing a volume of records far above their usual activity, or out-of-hours access to data they don't normally consult. A frequent challenge is the volume of these logs, which become unmanageable without correlation tools. Many organizations discover improper access to customer data months after it happened, precisely because the logs existed but nobody reviewed them systematically.