Crossbeam Leverages DataGuard to Ensure HighLevel Data Protection
ABOUT CROSSBEAM
Crossbeam is a collaborative data platform that helps companies build more valuable partnerships. It acts as an escrow service for data, allowing companies to find overlapping customers and prospects with their partners, while keeping the rest of their data private and secure. Their collaborative intelligence platform allows B2B companies to securely share their data to strengthen alliances, enable go-to-market teams, and better serve their customers.
The Challenge
Chris Castaldo, Crossbeam CISO, and his team are committed to keeping their business, customers, partners and, most importantly, their data safe from cyber threats. The team sought a single solution that could show exactly who and what has access to data, put guardrails around that data, and ultimately could ensure protection of data against cyber threats. They had processes in place to do this arduous task manually, but it required the use of valuable time, money, and resources that could be reallocated to other critical business tasks. They needed a robust data security posture management (DSPM) solution that could tell them at any time where their data was, who had access to it, and what it was being used for.
The Goal
The team’s ultimate goal was to ensure all their data was protected, while also having the ability to see who has access to what data at any given time. This was especially important for SOC2 audits. They also wanted to be able to determine, from a hacker’s point of view, which of their applications could be compromised. They had evaluated products that could determine some of this from an outside perspective, but they wanted something that really started from the inside—that is, ”security from the data out.” Why wait for a cyber threat actor to get to the data before deploying protections? Crossbeam wanted a product that started with data protection.
The Choice
Chris and his team evaluated a few different data security posture management solutions before selecting Symmetry Systems’ DataGuard.
The other companies that the Crossbeam team looked at viewed data security from the outside in—that is, from the perimeter—to defend against attacks, rather than approaching security based on the attacker’s main objective—the data. For Crossbeam’s AWS cloud environment, DataGuard fit perfectly into their “security-from-the-data-out” ideology. Chris and the Crossbeam team saw the immediate benefit to a solution that offered improved data visibility, reduced data sprawl, and helped the Crossbeam security team prioritize their data security risks.
The Outcomes
One of the greatest challenges DataGuard has solved for Crossbeam is the ability to see how data was being used and who was using it. Prior to deploying DataGuard, Crossbeam had no automated way to monitor data access and activity—everything was time and resource intensive. With DataGuard, Crossbeam can easily show auditors who accesses which data, how much privileged access they have, and if there are any errors in the data. The solution offers high, precise visibility into what is happening to the data.
After deployment and at the request of Crossbeam, Symmetry Systems used DataGuard to look for system weaknesses. According to Chris, during the test, the moment someone tried doing something they weren’t supposed to, DataGuard alerts for anomalous behavior were triggered, demonstrating DataGuard’s full capacity to actively and accurately protect the organization’s data.
“What sets DataGuard apart? Telling me about a problem is 1x value, but showing me the problem and then actually fixing it, that is 10x value, and that’s what DataGuard provides. The value we get out of it is much higher than what we spend on it.”
Chris Castaldo, CISO
About Symmetry Systems
Symmetry Systems is the industry’s first hybrid cloud data security platform that safeguards data in AWS, GCP, Azure services, and on-premise databases while supporting a data-centric zero trust model. With Symmetry, security and compliance teams can address threats quickly through AI-driven data security posture management (DSPM). Symmetry provides visibility into data risks from excessive permissions and anomalous data flows while giving organizations the evidence required to demonstrate compliance best practices.