Data Discovery and Classification
“The number one thing about Data(base) security is that you have to know what you have.”
An important first step to protect sensitive data is to identify its existence. As the 2016 Data Breach Investigations Reports says, “You can’t effectively protect your data if you don’t know where it resides”. This can be challenging, because database environments are highly dynamic and most organizations lack an effective means of identifying existing and new sensitive data. Even in a stable environments, new data sources are inadvertently introduced due to:
- a) developers create temporary test environments,
- b) Business units seeking to rapidly implement local applications,
- c) Purchase of new applications with embedded databases etc.
Any organization dealing with an acquisition may also struggle with identifying sensitive data in the acquired infrastructure. An automated mechanism for discovery and classification is a critical component to a data protection strategy to prevent a breach of sensitive data.
Adaptive Systems has helped many organizations to auto-discover their databases at enterprise level. The auto-discovery of databases can be configured to probe specified network segments on a scheduled or on-demand basis, and can report on all databases. In large percentages of incidents, unknown data played a role in the compromise.
Adaptive Systems can also help organizations in identifying where their sensitive data resides so that organizations can protect this data and monitor it.
If this is something your organization would like to explore? Give us a call and we can discuss the deliverables and also talk about some of the pre-requisites.
As part of the project we can also help you with the following pre-requisites:
1) Customer should have Licensed Guardium implemented in the network
2) Provide IP addresses of network to identify databases
3) Provide ID/password of identified databases to scan for sensitive data
4) Provide other resources like DBA’s assistance (in some cases), access to network etc.
5) Provide pattern for sensitive data for PCI, PII etc.
Deliverables:
1) Identify all the databases within customer network
2) Provide list of databases that contain PCI or PII data
3) Other agreed by Adaptive and customer
The following YouTube presentation will give you a very good idea of the data discovery and classification function of Guardium.
