The bundle of sticks is a very short fable from Aesop that teaches us an invaluable lesson: unity is strength. How does that relate to data privacy and protection? Let us explore the fable and see why every section of the story can help us understand how united data protection solution may help to protect our high-value data from attackers.

Bundle of Sticks Fable + Data Protection

A father had a family of sons who were perpetually quarreling among themselves. When he failed to heal their disputes by his exhortations, he determined to give them a practical illustration of the evils of disunion; and for this purpose, he one day told them to bring him a bundle of sticks.

Today we have a myriad of security platforms to protect our business applications. In terms of data security, these are just like the evils of disunion. Sometimes our protection solutions in different environments seem to be quarreling and working against each other.

When the children bought the bundle of sticks, he placed the bundle into the hands of each of them in succession and ordered them to break it in pieces. They tried with all their strength and were not able to do it.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a security platform that is resilient enough to protect multiple business applications and keep data protected consistently throughout its lifecycle? Many organizations are implementing data-centric protection to replicate the strength of a bundle of sticks because it offers the best protection from attackers who are always trying to break your data security.

He next opened the bundle, took the sticks one by one, and gave them to his sons and asked them to break the sticks, upon which they broke them easily.

Many organizations often rely on using application security (think of Snowflake, Oracle, SAP etc.) or cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure) specific protections. This is no different than the individual sticks because they do not interoperate and can be easily defeated because of data security gaps that occur when data moves between the platforms!

He then addressed them in these words: "My sons, if you are of one mind, and unite to assist each other, you will be like this bundle, uninjured by all the attempts of your enemies; but if you are divided among yourselves, you will be broken as easily as these sticks."

The father here is communicating to his sons and providing an invaluable lesson to us that arguing and not being united makes us vulnerable to our enemies. Data breaches are becoming more frequent, and not having an effective protection strategy makes us vulnerable to attacks.

Voltage runs natively on public clouds and off cloud while supporting hybrid IT, across almost all business platforms, SaaS applications with industry-leading stateless key management and format-preserving encryption. Like our “Brick House Story” we believe that we all will likely experience a breach at some point. Protecting the data at the source and keeping it protected throughout the data’s lifecycle offers the most comprehensive defense and regulatory compliance.

In conclusion, the bundle of sticks fable shows us that we can work together like the bundle and help protect the forces of good, people’s most sensitive and valuable data, so that your data security is stronger than a singular stick.

Learn more about Voltage and how we can help eliminate your privacy and security gaps in this knowledge hub.

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