Sensitive data is information that can cause harm to individuals or organisations, if it were to be exposed.

You have a legal and moral obligation to protect any sensitive information you store or process, particularly if your organisation adheres to regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI DSS.

Examples of sensitive data can include:

• Personally Identifiable Information (PII)
• Protected Health Information (PHI)
• Trade secrets
• Intellectual property 
• Customer or employee financial information 
• Legal data 
• Biometric data

With businesses handling sensitive data on a daily basis, it can be difficult to keep track of where it is being shared, and who with. Sensitive data discovery and classification helps you identify and locate sensitive data across your digital platforms.

Your SaaS applications such as Slack, Google Drive, and Notion will be scanned for sensitive data, and you’ll be alerted to where high risk files are stored. Having this visibility enables you to understand the context of your data, and be proactive when it comes to minimising risks.

Sensitive data discovery tools take an inventory of your data across the locations you’ve scanned and give you insights into what data exists, and where it is stored.

A robust solution like Metomic will help you find and classify the data, and understand more about the contents, for instance, are you seeing PII or financial information? What is the volume of sensitive data like? And where does it exist within your systems? Having these answers will give you the context you need to make informed decisions when it comes to your data.

Every organisation is constantly generating data, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to manage the wealth of information that is sprawled across an organisation. Data discovery makes it possible to control.

Not only will you get insights into the types of sensitive data you have within the company, you’ll also be able to understand it. Sensitive data discovery tools make it possible to keep your data safe, to understand how your company is using data, to see where your most critical data risks lie, and to assess the processes that are giving rise to the riskiest scenarios.

For example, your Customer Success team may be sharing KYC documents liberally in unsecured SaaS applications like Slack. Perhaps they’re missing a tool that would be perfect for this process, but until you can understand why data is being shared, you might not know there are underlying problems.

Sensitive data discovery is only the start of reducing your data risks. Not only does Metomic help you detect it, we also help you understand it by identifying the risks and problems we find.

With automated remediation, based on rules and policies you put in place, Metomic gives you the tools you need to operate at scale and enforce data security policies across your entire organisation.

In just a few clicks, you can redact, quarantine, move, or delete large swathes of data, minimising your attack surface. And with real-time employee notifications delivered via Slack, you can educate your team on your data security policies whenever they commit a violation, ensuring they are continually aware of the risks of sharing sensitive data in SaaS applications.