What is sensitive data discovery? why data discovery and best practices

What is sensitive data discovery? why data discovery and best practices

Sensitive Data Discovery

Data Discovery is more aligned with the process of identifying and locating different kinds of data types, be it sensitive, personal, or even regulated to protect it or securely remove it.

Data Discovery has a lot in particular with content auditing as it can thoroughly audit all kinds of sensitive or regulated information including personal and proprietary data. It even provides an extra hand to security teams to safely identify such types of information and ensure that it’s safeguarded.

Over the course of the last few years, data discovery has become one of the businesses?s biggest intelligence trends which is a priority for a lot of enterprise security teams as it’s a crucial component of compliance readiness.

Why Data Discovery?

With the abundance of workers working remotely, businesses often rely on the cloud to access and store their data. However, this is equally frustrating for an enterprise that can?t differentiate between what kind of data they could term as sensitive and what’s regulatory.

Considering the connectivity and networking between devices that exist today, data could be present on a variety of streams and different systems or databases, making confidentiality and data protection a challenge.

This is where data discovery helps us identify a company?s data wholly and provide the desired controls for the best security practices and regulatory compliance measures.

Enterprise data moves from one location to another and is stored at countless locations, right from a user’s computer to his online cloud services and applications. Employees, customers, or business partners could access this data from any device, be it secure or not which ultimately poses a risk to such data.

To prevent such scenarios, identifying, locating, and classifying the data to protect is the top priority of data discovery security solutions.

Data Discovery is a great alternative to understand what kind of data needs to be masked or encrypted.

Some of its common benefits include:

  • It applies the pre-determined classifications and protection policies to all kinds of data present in your enterprise.
  • It identifies and tracks sensitive data along with sorting it out as well.
  • It?s a comprehensive approach towards monitoring of data access and activity.
  • Data Discovery is a great alternative to understand what kind of data is present within enterprises, how and where it?s stored and who can access it.
  • It automatically classifies the data based on context.
  • It can even apply protective controls to data in real-time based on predefined collections and policies.

Data Discovery: Best Practices

Gathering

This involves gathering both the sensitive and non-sensitive data that could be viewed easily and sorted accordingly. For ensuring that an enterprise?s data is in compliance with the regulations, the location of the collected information needs to be considered as much as possible.

Analyzing

As soon as data is in a manageable environment, it?s evaluated and analyzed thoroughly.?

However, when the data overall is classified, it’s important to separate the data based on sensitive data and what?s necessary as well.

You can also determine what kind of data is primary and needs to be saved at all times and what could be discarded.

Purging

Purging could technically be referred to as removing or deleted and that?s exactly what this step is. At this stage, all the unnecessary data is purged. However, before data is sent for purging, it needs to be analyzed unconditionally.

Protection

Data that are reviewed and sent through registries need to be protected in the first place.?

However, a thing to note is that when data is sent for protection, it needs to be protected physically (like a data storing room) as well as digitally (with data masking or encryption).

Use

When data is finally discovered, there are different insights and analytics derived from the same. These could be used to examine your sales, understand your operations, and make your enterprise better as a whole.

Over to You [CONCLUSION]

Globally, enterprises are moving data to and fro at unprecedented rates which even involves sensitive data. This makes sensitive data discovery more crucial, now more than ever.

This helps to maintain great security around your working environment and safeguard your personal/corporate data.?

The establishment of data discovery throughout your enterprise is going to help you implement some of the best security measures that save your sensitive data and avoid any dreadful consequences for the enterprise.