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In today’s increasingly digital business world, data is quickly becoming many companies’ largest asset. Intellectual property and R&D data, privacy data, and corporate secrets are all critical components of a business’ competitive strategy and must be used and shared around the organization to be utilized to their full potential. This sensitive data, invariably and unknowingly, ends up on laptops, desktops, servers, USBs, CDs, and other media forms throughout the enterprise’s global network. With the ease of transfer of digital data, this information becomes vulnerable to loss, misuse, and theft. Corporations and their IT departments struggle to find and catalog this information as it moves around and multiplies so quickly and easily. However, finding this information is imperative to protecting the company and complying with regulations including SOX, GLBA, HIPAA, PCI, ITAR, and more.
Finding and monitoring sensitive data gives companies valuable visibility into where risk lies within their organization. Traditional security technologies have lacked the ability to do this, rather focusing on points of egress. One solution encrypts USB devices, another encrypts e-mails, and yet another blocks CD burning. None of these solutions are fully holistic and none of them find or follow data – they simply sit at their assigned point of egress from the system or network and hope to catch data before it leaves. Verdasys offers a proven solution to solve this lack of visibility and control.
A core element of Verdasys’ Enterprise Information Protection solution, Digital Guardian, is its comprehensive data discovery, classification, real-time discovery, and monitoring capability. Digital Guardian is able to use content and context based classification to find sensitive and identify sensitive documents. Using what information is in the document, what type of file it is, where it is located, and many other parameters, Digital Guardian can tell if the file contains PCI, PII, HIPAA, Social Security Numbers, Intellectual Property, and several other types of data. It is able to tell how much of this data is in each file and assign those files a user-defined level of risk. Once the file has been analyzed, it is then classified. A ‘tag’ is added to the file and using that tag, the system will apply or not apply certain policies to it. Highly sensitive files will adhere to strict policies while other files will adhere to looser policies, or not be affected at all. Once this sensitive data has been found and classified, Digital Guardian monitors and records all activity surrounding that file and then organizes that data into useful reports with which IT administrators can later analyze risk. In addition, all classification propagates to new files and derivatives. If, for example, a user takes a screen capture of a sensitive document and pastes the image into a new file, that file will be classified as well.
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