Every piece of sensitive data could have 1,000 unnecessary copies

Data risk reduction specialist Identity Finder has rebranded itself as Spirion and has released the results of long-term sensitive data audits at three of its largest enterprise sites.

During the audits, the company discovered that if left unchecked, every legitimate piece of sensitive data will create up to 1,000 unnecessary copies.

What's more, the company found that if left unmanaged, for every legitimate user of sensitive data, up to 100 additional users will end up having access to it. These assessments are based on before and after audits of the implementation of Spirion’s Data Platform.

"To eliminate the risks associated with data proliferation, it’s important to first identify 100 percent of an organization’s sensitive data. Then start taking control by automatically classifying it according to your rules and policies," says Dr Jo Webber, CEO of Spirion. "Your solution should be able to remove extra, unneeded copies, stop additional spread at the time of creation, and apply appropriate controls and protection over needed copies. And monitoring and managing sharing should be able to be handled internally and integrate with a gateway DLP (Data Loss Prevention) solution to leverage classification and stop external over-sharing and leaks".

Spirion's platform gives customers the ability to set policy based on specific business needs and offers a real time historical database and remote cloud discovery to find data anywhere at any time. The entire solution is automated, persistent and features automatic and user driven classification definitions to satisfy internal development teams.

The Spirion website has an on-demand webinar available that looks at how organizations can reduce their risk by identifying sensitive data.

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