Defending data isn’t easy. If it were, we wouldn’t see new data breach headlines on a weekly—or sometimes even daily—basis. That said, defending data also isn’t rocket science. A new report from Nuix highlights some of the major concerns with protecting data, and also illustrates some of the ways in which consistent vigilance is half the battle.

The Nuix report, compiled by principal researcher Ari Kaplan, covers a broad spectrum of concerns related to data security. Some of the key findings from the report include:

• Increased granularity of security budgets: Respondents report there is a growing trend to specify how the security budget should be broken down and allocated.
• Regulatory impact on spending has doubled: Government and industry compliance mandates continue to take a sizable bite out of security budgets.
• Greater focus on insider threats: More than 70 percent of respondents have some sort of insider threat policy or program.
• BYOD continues to play a role in security: 82 percent of respondents have some sort of BYOD (bring your own device) policy in place. A growing number of companies, however, are prohibiting remote access by employees.
• Cloud adoption slowing: According to the study, about 70 percent of companies are migrating data to the cloud—a number consistent with the previous year—but fewer companies are moving systems or servers to the cloud. More than four out of five respondents agreed that the cloud creates unique cybersecurity concerns, and only 43 percent indicated plans to move systems or servers to the cloud.

What sorts of unique security concerns does the cloud bring? According to the survey respondents, there are a variety of potential issues, such as:

• losing visibility into the management of data
• being at the mercy of the cloud provider’s security skills
• reduced control over access to data; and
• confusion about the privacy/legal issues when a government or law enforcement agency wants to access data.

In a nutshell, none of this is really new or different. Compliance, insider threats, BYOD and concerns over security and privacy in the cloud have been prevalent factors in network and computer security for years—and likely will continue to be for years to come. What has changed, though, is the focus on ways to implement better security and the tools to do it.

One of the primary issues with traditional computer and network security is that it’s reactionary. Scans provide moment-in-time confirmation that there are no known threats, but do little or nothing to protect against unknown threats or prevent exploits and compromises between scans. DevOps, and continuous security, change the game by enabling organizations to monitor for and detect security issues on a consistent, proactive basis.

“Security practitioners cannot continue to rely on manual, human controlled processes to defend against attacks,” agreed Andrew Storms, VP of Security Services for New Context. “Automation is a requirement for the next evolutionary phase of security protection.”

Nick Galbreath, founder and CTO of Signal Sciences, also believes that automation and continuous DevOps principles are key components of effective security. “I have argued that continuous deployment (how rapid the ‘continuous’ is up to the organization and risk-dependent on the nature of the code) is actually the most important security tool since without it, I don’t really know how you make things better rapidly.”

There are a lot of names tossed around for various aspects of DevOps automation. The actual name is not as important as the actual practice of proactively automating security processes for more effective security. Take a look at the report from Nuix to learn more about the general state of data security, but make sure you embrace DevOps and continuous security if you really want to do something about it.