Sensitive Data Discovery: Identify and analyze sensitive content automatically

No matter what industry you’re in, you likely have sensitive information worth protecting, whether it’s PII, financial reports, employee records, source code, etc. But keeping this information out of breaches and ensuring compliance requires visibility into where this sensitive data lives and how it moves, and the ability to control access to it. Data security breaches can have disastrous effects, from compliance failures to reputational damage and loss of data. In order to take a proactive approach to protecting sensitive data across the organization, it is vital to consider both data in transit and data at rest. 

One frequently neglected risk is sensitive data sitting at rest in mailboxes. In this post, you’ll learn how your security team can better classify sensitive messages automatically and take proactive measures to stop email leaks.

Sensitive Data Discovery with Material Security

Material Security offers sensitive data discovery to help you automatically identify and tag sensitive content. Material includes built-in data types that allow security teams to detect many classes of sensitive content out of the box. For example, in the image below, Material picks up payroll information, contracts, financial reports, and “confidential” information. You can extend this capability by building custom sensitive data types using simple search terms. And if that doesn’t meet your needs, you can work directly with our team to fine tune the sensitive data types.

Security teams can analyze the sensitive data classification results in a series of easy-to-use reports. These reports bring the most useful insights to the foreground with no work from the security team. At a glance, you can see what types of sensitive content exist, which users hold the most of it, and where the sensitive information is being shared. Drill into these reports further to understand if other organizations or individuals with access to sensitive data have been in known breaches, or download the full set as a CSV to explore on your own. And with Material’s Data Platform, you have the option of going deeper by accessing data directly in Google BigQuery or Snowflake to run whatever analysis you want.

One Step Further: Secure the sensitive content

Finding and classifying sensitive data is a great start but not enough. In order to protect your business against a data breach, you need to secure the sensitive data and keep it out of attackers’ hands. Material’s Leak Prevention solution helps with just that. It finds and redacts sensitive content across your Microsoft and Google accounts and returns the sensitive content on demand after a simple verification step. Only verified users can access the data. 

Nate Meir, Sr. IT Systems Engineer at Iterable, shared, "Material’s Leak Prevention helps Iterable’s IT team lessen the surface area vulnerable to attacks and ensure Iterable’s employees avoid activity that—intentionally or unintentionally—funnels company data into the wrong hands."

You can learn more about stopping data leaks with Material Security here.

Get Started with Sensitive Data Discovery and Message Classification

Sensitive content lives in a multitude of places across organizations. With Material Security, you can classify sensitive messages automatically, report on it easily, and protect against data loss. 

Schedule time with the Material Security team today to learn more and get started.