Dow Jones, parent of The Wall Street Journal, is among the latest companies to expose highly sensitive data, including the identities of global government officials, politicians and political influencers, on the public cloud. This high-profile breach was alarming for many reasons, the largest of which is that the authorized third party responsible for instigating the breach shouldn’t have had direct access to the 2.4 million records that were unnecessarily stored in a centralized database.
Companies that require access to, or answers from, sensitive personal data have a responsibility to install strict access controls. Leveraging technology that can carefully limit corporate access to the individual records that an authorized party needs ensures that information never has to be stored all in one place.