Open Raven Extends Cloud Data Discovery to 80+ Different Asset Types

Have you checked out our What We Discover page recently? We’ve been busy birds. The Open Raven Cloud Data Protection platform now auto-discovers over 80 data store types and other cloud assets across your public cloud environment.

There is an ever-growing slew of ways for data to get created, moved, and stored in public cloud environments. To get a glimpse of that slew, DB-Engines Ranking ranks database management systems by popularity, covering over 340 types. Here at Open Raven, we did an analysis of the top 100 as ranked by DB-Engines, and we determined that 74 of 100 are applicable to run in a public cloud environment. If one extrapolates 74% to the 340 types ranked in total, that’s roughly 250 different data store types that could be storing data in your public cloud environment. But we’re only referring to database types here; add on file storage, backup storage, and generic storage types and you could have a whole lot more.

Open Raven is the first cloud security platform to discover both native and non-native data stores across a public cloud environment. Native data stores are services native to a public cloud provider’s offering, e.g. AWS Redshift, AWS S3, AWS Backup. Non-native stores are databases that run non-natively on cloud compute, e.g. Couchbase, MySQL, Splunk running on an EC2 instance. Open Raven uniquely discovers data stores in both implementations. Open Raven uses various cloud-native APIs and techniques to discover the cloud-native data stores. We then use our DMAP fingerprinting technology to discover all the non-native data store running on cloud compute. See our white paper about our DMAP fingerprinting technology if you’re interested in learning more about how it works.

There are many types of modern data stores that Open Raven discovers, including:

• Key-Value Stores, e.g. Redis, Amazon DynamoDB
• Wide-Column Stores, e.g. Cassandra, HBase, Accumulo
• Document Stores, e.g. MongoDB, Couchbase, Jackrabbit, DocumentDB
• Graph Stores, e.g. Neo4j, OrientDB, ArangoDB
• Search Engine Stores, e.g. Elasticsearch, Splunk, Solr
• Multi-Value Stores, e.g. Adabase
• Content Stores, e.g. Jackrabbit, MarkLogic
• Time-Series Stores, e.g. InfluxDB, Graphite, Prometheus
• Multi-mode Stores (SQL-on-Hadoop tools), e.g. Apache Drill, Spark SQL
• Relational databases / RDBMS / SQL, e.g. Oracle, MySQL, Postgre, DB2

Plus, there’s a bunch of native data stores that Open Raven discovers. Looking at AWS native services, here are some of the data store services that we discover:

• Backup Storage, e.g. AWS Backup
• Big Data/Analytics, e.g. AWS Redshift
• File Storage, e.g. AWS EFS, FSx
• Non-Relational Databases, e.g. AWS DocumentDB
• Relational Databases, e.g. AWS Aurora, AWS RDS for Oracle, SQL Service, MariaDB
• Storage, e.g. AWS S3, Sharepoint on AWS

Again, you’ll find the latest and complete list on our What We Discover page. Want to find a data store that isn’t listed on the page? Let us know, as we’re constantly adding more data stores to discover.

Data discovery – identifying where your data is in the cloud – is the fundamental first step to any data protection, privacy, and governance strategy. It needs to be comprehensive, correct, and continuous – in a way that scales without performance or cost snafus to the largest enterprise public cloud environments.

The rules of the game for “finding where all our data is” has changed completely with cloud. More and more employees need access data to do their jobs better, and the cloud enables it. For example, customer-facing teams like Sales, Marketing and Customer Success teams are now directly handling customer data. Adding to teams like Product Marketing, Customer Analysis, Planning, and more. Enormous piles of data easily get copied and sometimes get shipped off to partners, often forgotten and left unattended after use.

You want to control access. But you can't just "control access" when you don't even know what you have. The two key elements of data governance – access and security – need to be balanced in every enterprise. Modern data governance is as much keeping data secure as it is about keeping it accessible and usable for business benefits. Striking the right balance on security and access to each data store is of paramount importance to business success.

Join our community and see how Open Raven’s Community Edition can continuous help you in real-time to find where all your data exists in your public cloud estate. Best of all, the product is free. Get your download today.

Finally, if you not only interested in knowing where all your cloud data is at all times, but also what data is sensitive and how to monitor and protect it all with a policy-driven approach, then you need to see a product demo of our upcoming Professional Edition platform. Scalable and automated data protection for your public cloud environment is just waiting for you to be discovered.