Data Discovery & Classification

Today, data lives in a dynamic environment that spans public and private clouds, SaaS, and hybrid architectures. The fragmented nature of the data landscape and the continuous growth of data, which is projected to reach 180 zettabytes by 2025, give rise to data sprawl and, consequently, shadow data.

This creates a significant challenge for data security, privacy, governance, and compliance teams to gain visibility into data. In fact, 82% of cybersecurity professionals cite gaps in discovering and classifying data across their environment. A lack of data visibility isn’t just a technical concern for CISOs but a significant security, governance, and compliance threat.

Data discovery provides comprehensive visibility, but cannot distinguish between a country name and someone’s name or a phone number and a Social Security Number (SSN). Classification is critical for proper identification and categorization. Data classification helps distinguish between sensitive data and personal data, i.e., what data is PII or financial information. These insights are necessary to enforce the right level of security controls and to comply with regulatory frameworks like GDPR and CPRA .

Typical organizations are challenged to ensure accurate and seamless classification. One of the biggest reasons is the high rate of false positives that occur due to traditional classification methods, such as regular expressions (regex). With a standardized and accurate classification engine, organizations can’t apply the right controls to protect data and AI.

Data discovery and classifications are the core components of DSPM . A purpose-built data discovery engine of a robust DSPM integrates seamlessly with cloud repositories, data warehouses, SaaS applications, and multicloud environments to identify and discover cloud-native and shadow data assets. It further leverages AI and Machine Learning (ML) techniques to categorize and label data with high accuracy. With out-of-the-box classifiers added to the mix, it offers a rich, comprehensive classification engine that can label a wide range of structured and unstructured sensitive data .

To make every data security effort count, organizations require full visibility and categorization across their data, which is what data discovery & classification can offer.