"Ghost Data Increases Enterprise Business Risk"

Security researchers at Cyera stated that cloud sprawl is a big issue for organizations, with business teams using cloud systems and services on their own, often without IT oversight.  That leads to cloud data sprawl as data is scattered across different environments.  The researchers noted that if IT doesn't know about the cloud systems and services, then IT is also not managing the data being collected, processed, and stored there.  The researchers noted that shadow data refers to unmanaged data store copies and snapshots or log data not part of IT's backup and recovery strategy.  The researchers estimate that 60% of the data security posture issues present in cloud accounts stem from unsecured sensitive data.  The researchers stated that ghost data is also a problem.  When data gets deleted from cloud systems, it isn't fully gone.  Copies linger in backups or snapshots of data stores.  Ghost data refers to those copies left behind after the original has been deleted, and the researcher's recent analysis shows that enterprises have quite a lot of it.  After scanning the three major cloud providers (Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google Cloud), the researchers found that over 30% of scanned customer cloud data stores are ghost data, and more than 58% contain sensitive or very sensitive data.   The researchers stated that ghost data usually has no business value, and having it around unnecessarily increases business risk.  The researchers said organizations must reduce cloud data exposure to reduce data sprawl.  Proper data hygiene across clouds will also help clean up data when it is no longer in use.  The researchers noted that ghost data can also increase the organization's cloud costs.  The researchers found over $50,000 in excess data store snapshots being retained in a cloud environment.

Dark Reading reports: "Ghost Data Increases Enterprise Business Risk"