Remediation Is The Key To Data Protection And Measured Business Policy

Remediation is the key to data protection and measured business policy

A valued part of my role at Data Sentinel is speaking to a continuous stream of new prospects to have an initial chat about our solution. I love speaking to their teams on our capabilities and core competencies. As such it’s important to not only describe how we find their information effectively, in a performant way, leveraging modern solutions, using a democratic user experience but to also showcase how they can take advantage of our solution to remediate their data challenges as a continuous safeguard to data anomalies. 

First let us start with the ‘why’ organizations need to remediate. It may be a surprise to most companies who have not run advanced capabilities to showcase the data they have, specifically data that hasn’t been seen before or termed ‘dark data’. Gartner defines dark data, and I am paraphrasing here, data that organizations store during regular business activities and are not used for other purposes (analytics, business relationships and data monetization). This data is usually retained for the purpose of compliance or general record keeping. 

The benefit of Data Sentinel is in showcasing not only your day-to-day data but also to shine a light on data that hasn’t been seen before and bring all that information to bear through proper classification and data labeling processes. Through this process we widen the net and bring to light data that is known and in many cases data that hasn’t been seen before. When that light shines on data that is both beneficial but also could prove painful, we get the common question which is how to manage and control this new data based on our initial discovery process.

The answer is quite simple – remediation. Data remediation for us is to define a set of policies based on your data from the simplest to the most sophisticated set of rules, and to deploy those in your environment to continuously find the data issues over time. These remediation policies will constantly be on the lookout for these types of data patterns, data values, and trigger policy violations where your data is an exception to those policies. Shining a light on your core and dark data assets to support your organization in a variety of use cases including data privacy, data compliance, data enforcement, data ethics and other policies important to your company.

To add a little color to this think about your use cases and how you can make data remediation policies work for you. Some of our customers are searching for data assets to drive new privacy programs. Others are looking to put remediation policies in place to ensure data is all in the right (and safe) place. Others still are finding surprises in their data and take advantage of that knowledge for both monetary and data safety purposes. While your remediation policies may differ from those above, we would love to have that discussion with you and show you how Data Sentinel can be tailored to your business needs.