Transforming the Data Discovery Strategies of Two Very Different Customers

PKWARE has great customers all over the world across several industries. From Fortune 100 companies in financial services to healthcare organizations and government entities, we help these enterprises with all-encompassing data security solutions to protect their most sensitive data, regardless of how or where it is stored, moved or used. And, with the significant increase of cyberattacks, making security a priority is more important than ever to organizations across the globe.

While many companies opt to not share which security company they work with—to further protect themselves from cyberattacks—we wanted to showcase some of the very important work we are doing for two cloaked customers: a social media company and a large insurance provider.

Protecting Consumer Data

The first customer, a popular social media company, implemented PKWARE’s services after facing some concerns of sharing and storing sensitive personal data. After this platform experienced exponential growth in a very short amount of time, the company realized the manual processes it had implemented for security just weren’t cutting it. And, on top of its ever-increasing user database, it was also dealing with finding hundreds of petabytes worth of data in a number of disparate sources– which is impossible for a manual solution to sift through. Therefore, the company needed a solution that could help them distill down all its data quickly and efficiently. So, after evaluating multiple offerings on the market, this company decided to work with us after realizing we were the only company able to meet their immediate needs in the most timely and effective fashion.

PK Discovery allowed them to plug in exactly what data elements they were looking for—including user information like names—and quickly get the location of where PKWARE found the requested information in a sort of heat map. This lets customers know where the information is, without actually exposing it. Our tool can find very specific data elements containing very sensitive information that a company is looking for, including credit card and social security numbers. Even more, it can also find this data on any platform—whether that’s on-premises, in the cloud, on endpoints, etc.—while keeping the data protected.

After sorting through permissions and access, implementation of PK Discovery only took a couple hours. Another reason they chose us was because of the product’s ease of use. PK Discovery can run without interrupting users, which was very important to this customer so as not to disrupt its operations.

Moving from Homegrown to PKWARE

Another customer using our data discovery tool is a large insurance company that was originally using a manual, homegrown solution. However, with growing demand from the business, coupled with the increasing petabytes of data they were accumulating, the need for data discovery and security exceeded the capabilities of its existing solution. The company found the manpower needed to manage it became too burdensome and unsustainable for the long run. So, it turned to PK Discovery for its automation capabilities, scalability and flexibility. In fact, PK Discovery’s performance and impact to the production system was so seamless, administrators didn’t even realize the product was running in the background. The system was installed in 45 minutes on two platforms and less than five days later, a proof of concept was completed. There are now plans to expand our use to the cloud and additional on-premises platforms as well.

The industry that this customer is in—financial services—is heavily regulated, which is another issue it was having with its original solution. Typically, homegrown solutions are designed based on the specific regulatory requirement needed at the time, and not meant to be forward-looking and adaptable to future requirements. But, with PKWARE’s 15 years of development work, it allows for the flexibility for companies to meet current regulations, and future variations of laws such as Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

Now, this customer is also using privacy and endpoint security from PKWARE to help it avoid fines from federal regulators. In fact, on one of the platforms, it was able to meet the regulatory requirements on a petabyte of data in just two business days. With diverse and ever-changing regulations across the states and the potential of a federal mandate possibly on the horizon, PKWARE’s solutions ensure customers are fully compliant with the click of a button, basically future-proofing the solution for whatever laws are passed next.

Starting with Discovery

Oftentimes, the first tool companies start with is PK Discovery, because after all, how can you protect what you can’t see? This tool is especially popular with large enterprises that have endless amounts of data because an automated solution is really the only option for them to have complete discovery across all the locations their data lives. After experiencing the ease of use, quick installation and complete platform support, customers often start exploring our other PKWARE tools, like PK Masking and PK Encryption to protect the sensitive data PK Discovery found – whether it’s at rest or in motion. They see the true value the solution delivers to help increase productivity and automatically apply security, letting users focus on the tasks at hand and not worry about security interruptions.

Data is the life-blood of any organization, so it’s essential that they protect it, especially if it’s sensitive consumer data like financial numbers or healthcare results they hold. PKWARE has all the tools enterprises need to fully protect company data, from data discovery to ensuring companies are compliant regardless of their location or industry.

Is your company looking for an end-to-end data security solution? Request a free personalized demo with us today and check out our other customer case studies to see how PKWARE helped organizations with PCI compliance, encryption, and more.