Among the best practices called for in ISO 27799 are:

• Data access controls, including management of privileged access
• Cryptographic control of sensitive data
• Management and protection of encryption keys
• Recording and archiving “all significant events concerning the use and management of user identities and secret authentication information” and protecting those records from “tampering and unauthorized access.”²

Thales eSecurity can help you meet the standards in ISO 27799:2016 through:

• Access controls that let only credentialed users retrieve data
• Encrypting or tokenizing data so that if it is stolen, it is meaningless and therefore useless to cybercriminals
• Centrally managing and securely storing encryption keys from across your organization
• Protected security intelligence logs to identify irregular access patterns and breaches in progress

Vormetric’s Data Security Platform provides state of the art user access control.

• Separation of privileged access users and sensitive user data. With the Vormetric Data Security Platform, organizations can create a strong separation of duties between privileged administrators and data owners. Vormetric Transparent Encryption encrypts files while leaving their metadata in the clear. In this way, IT administrators—including hypervisor, cloud, storage, and server administrators—can perform their system administration tasks, without being able to gain privileged access to the sensitive data residing on the systems they manage.
• Separation of administrative duties. Strong separation-of-duties policies can be enforced to ensure one administrator does not have complete control over data security activities, encryption keys, or administration. In addition, the Vormetric Data Security Manager supports two-factor authentication for administrative access.
• Granular privileged access controls. Thales eSecurity’s solution can enforce very granular, least-privileged-user access management policies, enabling protection of data from misuse by privileged users and APT attacks. Granular privileged-user-access management policies can be applied by user, process, file type, time of day, and other parameters. Enforcement options can control not only permission to access clear-text data, but what file-system commands are available to a user.

Vormetric protects the data itself through Vormetric Transparent Encryption with integrated Key Management for data at rest, Application Encryption, Tokenization with Dynamic Masking and more. These techniques make the data meaningless and worthless without the tools to decrypt it.

Integrated Key Management from Thales eSecurity provides a robust, standards-based platform for managing encryption keys from disparate sources across the enterprise. It simplifies the management and administrative challenges around encryption key management to ensure that keys are secure and always provisioned to authorized encryption services.

Thales eSecurity lets the enterprise monitor and identify extraordinary data access. Vormetric Security Intelligence Logs are detailed management logs that specify which processes and users have accessed protected data. They specify when users and processes accessed which data, under which policies, and if access requests were allowed or denied. The management logs will even expose when a privileged user submits a command like 'switch users' in order to attempt to imitate, and potentially exploit, the credentials of another user. Sharing these logs with a security information and event management (SIEM) platform helps uncover anomalous patterns in processes and user access, which can prompt further investigation. For example, an administrator or process may suddenly access much larger volumes of data than normal, or attempt to do an unauthorized download of files. These events could point to an APT attack or malicious insider activities.