When you analyze a company’s journey as it becomes a more data-driven organization, you start to see some pretty clear patterns. Invariably, we see customers walking the path below regardless of industry vertical or company size:
Understanding data
- Discover and classify sensitive data
- Understand who is accessing sensitive data (and when, how much, and how)
Governing data
- Add controls governing access to sensitive data
- Add controls to ensure data privacy and regulatory compliance
Protecting sensitive data
- Apply advanced controls to limit data risk and integrate security
- Tokenize critically sensitive data to protect against direct access threats
Everyone has these same needs around their data—and a heck of a lot more—but these are what we keep seeing as core requirements. The very first item on this path is data classification. If you think about it, you can’t really get started with anything else until you understand what and where your sensitive data is. Once you do that, applying governance and security policies is a matter of doing the work (for any data engineers reading, yes, a lot of work. Contact us!)
Heck, we need classification too. It allows us to better understand and report on data consumption, more easily apply governance controls, detect sensitive data in new data sources, and help our customers be confident that their data is both private and secure. We didn’t have it, and knew we needed to add support for it. The question was really about the best way to do so.
When it comes to discovering and classifying sensitive data, there are products out there doing a great job at that already (we’re looking at you, OneTrust and Collibra!). To add support in our own platform, we didn’t need to reinvent the wheel, we just had to add the classification “wheel” to our product’s “car”. And that’s what we did. Now, our customers can simply choose which classification provider they use, and ALTR’s integrations will take care of the rest, improving reporting on data access and making it even easier to implement governance controls. For companies without a current classification provider, we have an out-of-the-box integration as well so everyone who uses ALTR can understand and govern their organization’s sensitive data.
At ALTR, we work tirelessly to make it easy for you to not just walk this path from understanding to governing to protecting your sensitive data, but also to stay on it as you grow, adding more data, people, and platforms into the mix. We do as much of the heavy lifting ourselves as possible, delivering new and unique features that layer advanced data security on top of governance controls (for a primer on how governance and security are intertwined, check out this blog post. But we also believe this involves connecting the broader data ecosystem together so the tools and platforms you use share a unified understanding of your data. We’re excited that our support for data classification is an extension of this belief.
If you’d like to see data classification in action, request a demo!