Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023.  Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

2023 Data Security and Governance Predictions and Trends

By Privacera CEO and Co-Founder, Balaji Ganesan

Companies need to be proactive, not only about data security and investing for long-term growth and business success, but getting ahead of the ever-shifting regulatory environment. Data security platforms will continue to gain popularity as they help simplify the complexity of managing data access controls, support data governance strategies, and drive higher-value analytics that unlock the full data-driven potential of enterprises.

Below is a round-up of 2023 predictions and trends, including what we at Privacera believe will be top of mind for enterprise organizations that want to compete in a data-driven economy.

Chief Data Analytics Officers will Become a C-Suite Norm

As data is becoming more recognized as a strategic bet companies need to make, the Chief Data Analytics Officer role will become even more universal. Enterprises aspire to be data-driven to improve decision-making and achieve desired business outcomes. However, without someone strictly focused on leading data analytics, assessing internal and external data strategies, and developing the data's architecture, it is difficult to accomplish. While it is a developing space, with many of the executives new to the role, the ROI of bringing a CDAO in-house is clear. Over time we will see more CDAOs move front and center for data monetization strategies, similar to how CISOs became a "new norm" for information security strategy on the executive team. 

Congress Could Introduce New Federal Regulations to Protect Consumer Data

Consumers are becoming more aware of how organizations are collecting, storing, and using their data which is creating an urgency for Congress to write and pass federal regulations surrounding data security and privacy. Currently, regulations are enforced at the state level, in places like California, Colorado, and Utah. But the U.S. market needs a uniform federal mandate, similar to the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which we might see come to life with the newly elected Congress.

Moving toward a federal privacy law has bi-partisan support. Earlier this year, we saw the American Data Privacy and Protection Act (ADPPA), which would be a common standard for how to handle data, passed out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Fresh off the midterm elections we are expecting these conversations to continue among legislators and businesses alike.

As we wait for legislation, we can expect to see more "Big Fish" companies receive hefty fines for security incidents that resulted in breached information. Regulators will look to make an example of those who have been compromised with fines and other significant consequences, so it's more important than ever companies are proactive about their security approach. 

The Appetite for Multi-Cloud Adoption Will Continue to Grow in 2023

In terms of adopting a multi-cloud environment, most enterprise-level organizations are in the ambitious early stages of migration and still have a lot of data that needs to be moved. There are some "born in the cloud" enterprises that are fully integrated and working well, but over the next year, we expect the adoption of multi-cloud services to continue to rise as a majority of business leaders look to modernize their data architecture.

Since more organizations have shifted away from a single cloud solution when it comes to implementing their data strategies, we'll see many business leaders faced with the challenge of deciding which service providers they actually want to mix and match. To help make those important decisions, we expect business leaders to take a "best of breed" strategic approach that looks at individual organizational use cases. Choosing different cloud partners and services to handle different business needs has become a reality today. It does require a comprehensive data security governance approach to address the increasing challenges of a multi-cloud data strategy.

We also expect to see a shift in the share of voice from public cloud vendors to focus more on data governance, secure and trusted data management strategies. There's a sharpened focus from enterprise leaders seeking cloud partners that can offer more than data storage. They are looking for even more scalable ways of building data-centric applications including self-service analytics and modern data collaboration to get even more mileage - and ultimately value - out of that data. And a critical prerequisite to achieving this modern data collaboration is to integrate with a scalable data security platform.

Emerging Tech to Keep an Eye on Data Analytics, Privacy, and Security

We've recently seen many new vendors in the data security space looking to solve several challenges, including how enterprises can accelerate analytics through fine-grained access of data, while remaining compliant. This exhibits no sign of slowing down.

Adoption of data analytics, privacy and security infrastructure tools assure both a company's data and that of its customers are safe and data governance also plays a big role. Today's companies need to be smart, not only about security and investing for long-term growth and business success, but they must adhere to the ever-shifting regulatory environment.

Data security platforms are essential for the modern data stack, as they provide data protection using a combination of fine-grained access controls and, policy enforcement across the data estate, data masking, sensitive data discovery and classification; and encryption, and automated workflows to meet changing regulatory requirements. The combined power of this technology will skyrocket over the next few years as more and more data amasses within an organization. According to Gartner's Hype Cycle for Data Security 2022, a data security governance framework should be used to identify and prioritize business risks that will be mitigated by data security policies.

Zero Trust Comes of Age and Data Mesh Promotes Democratization

Zero trust and data mesh will also see an uptick in implementation. Both of these concepts allow data to stay where it is and make sense of it safely, ensuring compliance and that privacy is preserved. Zero trust is an approach to enterprise cybersecurity that presumes no connections to corporate IT assets should be trusted. Instead, zero trust begins with a "default deny" security posture: Trust no one and grant the least privilege. Data mesh promotes data democratization by enabling enterprise-wide users to access any dataset across organizations independent of data location, resulting in more business units to monetize data and drive business transformation.

Data security platforms will continue to gain popularity as they help simplify the complexity of managing data access controls, drive self-service analytics, support data governance strategies, and allow enterprises to realize their full data-driven potential. 

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Balaji Ganesan is CEO and co-founder of Privacera, a SaaS-based data access and governance platform that enables analytics teams to access data without compromising compliance with regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, LGPD, and HIPAA. Before Privacera, Balaji and Privacera co-founder Don Bosco Durai, also founded XA Secure. XA Secure's was acquired by Hortonworks, who contributed the product to the Apache Software Foundation and rebranded as Apache RangerTM. Apache Ranger is now deployed in thousands of companies around the world, managing petabytes of data in Hadoop environments. Privacera's product is built on the foundation of Apache Ranger and  provides a single pane of glass for securing sensitive data across on-prem and multiple cloud services such as AWS, Azure, Databricks, GCP, Snowflake, and Starburst and more.