We are excited to announce the availability of major new enhancements to Sensitive Data Platform that include:
- Advanced, context-rich data classification
- AnyScan™ connector support for cloud and big data sources
- Azure private cloud hosting
These new features increase the depth of Spirion’s purposeful data classification schema to support the business context of sensitive information and how it’s being used, so organizations can better control and act to protect it through automated remediation. It also extends the breadth of Spirion’s accurate data discovery to encompass new AnyScan connectors for big data and cloud repositories including Snowflake, Salesforce and others.
“Data privacy and security require more than just knowing where data is. It’s also about gaining greater clarity and transparency around how data is being used. Today’s new platform enhancements underscore Spirion’s commitment to finding sensitive data, wherever it lives, with unrivaled accuracy and protecting it against unauthorized access, use and modification through automated, context-rich classification and remediation to reduce financial, regulatory, and legal risks.”
— Rob Server, Spirion Field CTO
Context-rich data classification helps you understand how your sensitive data is being used
Data classification has always been a cornerstone of mature data governance programs. With growing threat surface risks arising from digital transformation, cloud migration and work from home initiatives, automated classification has become essential to an organization’s ability to understand their data, know where it is located, identify its contents — and ultimately make better decisions around it.
In addition to our current sensitivity classification (which sets confidentiality level), Spirion has added five new out-of-the-box purposeful classification categories to give customers more flexibility in how they organize and define their data.
These new granular, context-rich classification categories include:
- Process: provides context around business processes where the data is being used.
- Purpose: identifies why a business is collecting information about an individual.
- Preference: informs any customer preferences surrounding how the data can be used.
- Regulatory: associates any regulations that would govern the data, such as CPRA, GDPR, PCI, or HIPAA.
- Custom: allows organizations to easily create their own custom categories; for instance, classifying data by location of subjects, third-party processors, etc.
By auto-classifying documents based on content, and now, business context, customers are able to gain additional insight about their data and how it is being used. In turn, they can better understand the data’s risk and enact appropriate controls to protect it.
Additionally, Spirion’s context-rich classification playbooks give organizations the ability to act on classifications to enforce controls through automated remediation. Tagging data through classification becomes even most valuable to an organization when it can take action based on granular classifications. Once data has been configured by category type through context-rich classification, playbook actions can facilitate remediation efforts that automatically enforce further controls on sensitive data.
AnyScan connectors find sensitive information no matter where it lives
We are pleased to announce that Spirion has entered into a licensing agreement with CData, a leading provider of standards-based drivers for data integration, to expand the ability of Sensitive Data Platform to detect, classify and remediate sensitive data across more systems.
Spirion’s new AnyScan connectors provide initial connectivity to the following systems:
- Salesforce
- Snowflake
- Jira
- Confluence
- Microsoft Planner
- Apache Hadoop
- Apache Hive
- Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS)
- Apache HBase, Apache Phoenix, and Apache Parquet
Through this strategic relationship, customers will be able to scan for sensitive and restricted information in more than 200 disparate big data, SaaS, NoSQL, RDBMS, collaboration, ERP, accounting, and CRM data locations as AnyScan connectors are tested and released.
Spirion AnyScan connectors are plug-and-play to reduce integration time, cost and complexity for our customers. New AnyScan connectors will be tested and released on a quarterly basis.
Self-host Spirion on your own private Azure cloud
Spirion’s Sensitive Data Platform, Sensitive Data Finder and Sensitive Data Watcher solutions can now be hosted on a customer’s private Azure cloud subscription. This approach gives customers all the benefits of cloud services (cost savings, security, less maintenance) while retaining control over their Spirion tenant and data.
To self-host Spirion on a private Azure cloud, customers must have an active Azure tenant running on Linux OS. The set-up takes less than 30-minutes to configure.
Get your complete guide to context-rich data classification
To help illustrate why context is the most important part of data classification—and the missing piece from most data strategies—we created a new whitepaper, Unify Data Security, Privacy, and Governance with Contextual Data Classification.
It takes a deep dive into data classification, explaining why it matters, revealing what needs improvement, and highlighting how to get classification correct based on business context. Then, it explores several use cases and case studies of organizations using next-generation data classification to improve upon their data governance, security, and privacy initiatives.
Spirion’s white paper is valuable reading for any company starting (or struggling) to get serious about turning their data into a strategic asset.
