Data is growing at a crazy rate, and so it’s vital for organisations to have a plan in place for breaches. Accurate and incredibly timely disclosures to impacted data subjects and regulatory authorities can reduce the nasty impacts of a breach.
What’s more, businesses can utilise these events to learn about their informational security weaknesses, and, consequently, improve their overall security solution to reduce the risk of problems in the future.
With this increase in hardware and software usage, there has been a significant increase in fears of privacy. The best data discovery tools will not only potentially save your business from threats, but also provide the ultimate solution to locate and simplify new information.
But best practices are required, and they include:
- Scale to petabyte volume with ease & accuracy
As information volume reaches the petabyte scale, the privacy and security risks associated with information increases. Organisations need a solution that can scale to large informational volumes and offer scanning or detection capabilities that effectively reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO) over a certain timeframe by reducing computer resources needed to locate sensitive information within the assets.
- Map information to regulations & compliance
In privacy regulations, companies have to document their information processes. So, with the right data discovery solution, companies can construct a centralised catalogue of their assets and locate sensitive information stored within them. Utilising automated locating mechanisms, organisations can make sure their maps are updated with ease.
- Cataloguing & discovering sanctions & shadow assets
One of the most important abilities of any proper solution is the ability to to find and construct a central catalogue of all informational assets, including all shadow and sanction assets in multi-cloud and on-premises environments. Keeping on top of the informational assets is the first step towards saving it from unscrupulous intent and reducing its impact.
- Extracting & cataloguing metadata
Sensitive information catalogues provide REST-based APIs and native connectors to scan and extra metadata from all informational assets. These include cloud stores, non-relational stores, warehouses and more.
The three type of metadata includes:
- Business metadata: Provides organisations context about important information such as ownership, location and more;
- Technical metadata: Provides organisations with context for security and privacy, including important insights about information;
- Security metadata: Provides insights into the security posture of informational assets and their associated data.
3. Detect personal & sensitive information
Once cloud-based and on-premises assets are discovered, administrations have to know what sensitive information is stored on these particular assets. There are numerous important categories that affect business operations, including:
- Personal information
- Business or trade secrets
- Educational information
- Financial information
- Health information
- Cataloguing, classifying & tagging sensitive data
Sensitive information catalogues provide important insights into sensitive information attributes and privacy and security metadata such as purpose of processing, security controls etc. a sensitive information catalogue should be accessible by default in a proper informational solution as it parses and organises the information in a valuable way.
- Assess overall informational risk posture
Sensitive informational intelligence should easily provide comprehensive information risk assessments that include concentration, sensitivity and cross-border transfers.
The right solution can utilise all these parameters to assess the overall risk score, which can then be used for prioritising risk mitigation strategies.
- Make a graph between information & its owners
To fulfil DRS requests with ease and ability, organisations should ensure the solution can link discovered information with users’ identities automatically. Fulfilling DSR requests are required for global privacy regulations, and businesses can experience consequences of non-compliance.
