Leveraging Data Discovery to Drive Data Security

They first needed to identify where their sensitive data resided. In any organization, identifying sensitive data in both structured and unstructured form can be difficult. Documents, spreadsheets, data files, and images must be evaluated to determine whether they contain sensitive information. The company’s job was made more challenging by the differing standards used by each individual state and territory for assigning driver license numbers. Unlike the consistent formats used by major credit card issuers, each state creates its own standard, ranging up to 17 alphanumeric characters.

Critical Success Factors 

• Automatically identify and classify sensitive data in structured and unstructured forms, across the enterprise 
• Watch, Learn, Implement - Help create useful policies by mapping the use of critical data in their environment prior to policy development 
• Support multiple formats and rules used by states and territories for classifying driver information 
• Support Windows, Mac, Linux, Citrix, and virtual environments

The Solution

The most critical feature of any data loss prevention solution is the ability to accurately locate and identify sensitive data, in all formats, wherever it resides. Manually classifying data is inconsistent and subject to human error. Fortra™’s Digital Guardian® worked with the company to understand the different rules used by each state and territory to create driver license numbers. The ability of Digital Guardian’s automated classification to inspect content on-the-fly and support multi-factor rules, simplified PII identification while minimizing false positives and negatives. DG’s endpoint agents automatically identified PII, providing the company with its first ever, verifiable map of the sensitive data in their environment, including how that data was used.