Almost every industry operating today deals with sensitive data in some capacity. Many organizations within these industries don’t realize how much of their data is in jeopardy. The growth of unstructured data like emails, documents, images, and PDFs, are potential vulnerability points for brand impact, corporate liability, and fines. Sensitive data discovery is something that all businesses, regardless of industry or customer base, need to be aware of.
More specifically, unstructured data is at risk, which is where sensitive data discovery tools and DryvIQ’s sensitive data management can help. Let’s discuss.
What Is Sensitive Data Discovery?
Sensitive data discovery is the process of identifying and locating sensitive data to protect or securely remove any pieces of compromising information. While sensitive data discovery could be applied to both structured and unstructured data, our focus here is on discussing sensitive information within unstructured data.
So, what is unstructured data? This data type is not actively managed in a relational database management system. The danger is that unstructured data is everywhere and can eventually be stolen if not protected. Some examples of unstructured data include:
- Text Messages
- Social Media
- Medical Records
- Mobile Phone Data
To protect their data, businesses need to know how much of it is out there. Businesses can find new patterns and outliers by going through the sensitive data discovery process and exploring their unsecured data. This can help the business evaluate its current processes and work to improve future operational plans.
What Is the Purpose of Data Discovery?
Ensuring that a business is agile is vital to its success and longevity. Data discovery allows businesses to have an overview of their entire organization. With the consolidated data from discovery efforts, a business can develop and implement in-depth strategies, insights, context, and patterns to stakeholders. This allows businesses to become more efficient and effective in their operations.
When businesses allow data discovery to help them become more effective, they gain five significant benefits in the process.
- A Clear View of Your Data: Data discovery provides businesses with a big-picture view of the many data streams in their organizations, allowing them to combine these streams in their analyses and develop well-rounded solutions to meet challenges or customer needs around unstructured data.
- Democratized Insight for Decision-Making: The entire business can understand data analysis and how an individual’s specific team impacts a group they might not have thought they related to previously.
- Improved Risk Management and Compliance: Businesses become proactive in their risk management as data discovery helps them spot unstructured outliers and potential threats in their data.
- Data Classification Based on Relevant Context: With data discovery, companies can classify new information based on unstructured data that was previously collected.
- Real-time Data Control: Companies can apply specific actions that fit their individual needs to the data collected in real-time.
Due to how much unstructured data businesses have, it’s very difficult to obtain all of these benefits without data discovery platforms like DryvIQ.
What Are Data Discovery Tools?
Data discovery tools make managing massive amounts of unstructured data possible by sorting through existing information and automatically categorizing new data. The list of data discovery tools is ever-growing. Each tool fits into three data discovery categories: data preparation, visual analysis, and guided advanced analytics.
DryvIQ offers four tools essential to reaching a company’s security goal.
- Advanced Pattern Matching: Reduces false positives while improving accuracy and discovering common values and keywords.
- Document Type Classifier & Standardized Form Matcher: Sorts through various documents and forms such as federal and state government forms, IRS forms, FDA documents, work forms, and more.
- Language Detection: Identifies and groups documents from over 175 languages.
- Personal Identifiable Information (PII) Identification and Extraction: Identifies and extracts personal data such as names, ages, addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, and social security numbers.
PII is the type of data that can severely harm companies and their customers. One way to protect it is through PII scanning.
What Is PII scanning?
Keeping your client’s and teams’ PII secure is non-negotiable. This is priority number one when it comes to being a reliable enterprise. PII can be any information that is seen as an identifier for an individual or group of people.
Companies can leverage DryvIQ’s govern module to take action with “policy packs” based upon PII type, such as, “label all documents with addresses as sensitive.” Using deep learning technology, the sensitive data scanning tool identifies PII entities within structured forms and unstructured text. This process tracks down, identifies, and locates PII on various systems.
Put Your Sensitive Data In Good Hands With DryvIQ
The value of unstructured data security cannot be understated. DryvIQ detects, classifies, and labels sensitive information as part of our sensitivity label application process. We understand that it can be daunting to get a clear picture of your company’s unstructured data, but our team is here to walk you through every stage of the process.
Schedule a demo or contact us today if you are ready to take control of your data.
