Data Discovery & Classification

Data discovery and classification is the foundation of any data security project

Many organizations don't actually know where all of their sensitive data is or if it's dangerously exposed. Such blind spots create security risks that can lead to careless mistakes or create opportunities that attackers can exploit, often through hidden vulnerabilities or misconfigured databases you may not even know exist.

Imperva Data Security Fabric (DSF) Data Discovery and Classification automatically discovers all data stores in your data estate—from structured to semi-structured to unstructured—across on-premises, hybrid, cloud, and multicloud environments. Automated discovery and classification is the only reliable way to routinely and consistently discover and classify new or modified data stores as your data estate grows and expands—eliminating error-prone and costly manual procedures in the process.

Imperva DSF can programmatically identify and classify all sensitive data across your data estate, pinpointing its location and providing a risk-based prioritization to each asset that can help organizations plan their risk mitigation programs, systems, and policies.

Key features and benefits

Discover and classify data stores on-premises and in the cloud—from mainframe to hybrid to multicloud—ensuring your entire data estate is accounted for
Protects all data sources and types—from structured to semi-structured to unstructured
Programmatically pinpoint sensitive data and ensure the proper user access rights are in place to meet compliance mandates
Eliminate costly and error-prone manual procedures while accelerating audits and privacy compliance verifications

One data view, enterprise-wide

One challenge of data auditing and risk management often lies in the complex mix of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data repositories within an organization. Imperva DSF Data Discover and Classify can help uncover, identify, and classify sensitive information from a wide range of data sources regardless of their data type.

Imperva DSF Data Discover and Classify provides visibility into sensitive data's exact location, volume, and context. Driven by machine learning, it allows data owners to find and identify data regardless of cloud or on-premise environment or data source.

Automated, cross-directory searches allow data professionals to do an extensive scan across multiple data repositories simultaneously in seconds, finding the information that is needed for an auditor question, an individual's data lookup, or a data deletion request with maximum accuracy at scan speeds up to 100,000 words per second.

Structured vs. Unstructured Data

In many organizations, unstructured data in the form of email, files from office productivity suites, PDF documents, and various other application files is the majority of their data. Organizations have very little insight into what most of those files contain or what risk exposure they hold. Many threats from insider mishaps, malicious actors, cyber-attacks, ransomware, and other sources are always lurking in enterprise environments with files spread across on-premises and cloud data repositories.

The relentless growth of unstructured data

55-65%

Data that is defined as unstructured is growing at 55-65 percent each year

90%

As much as 90% of all data generated every year is defined as unstructured data

Benefits of connecting your unstructured data in Imperva Data Security Fabric:

Discover and understand metadata about files like entitlements, age, and size
Classify file content to understand what it means to the enterprise from a security or privacy perspective
Monitor file activity overtime to set up alerts on activity that can put the organization at risk

Discover

Deploy unstructured data discovery and classification services in hours, connect to anything, including Amazon S3, Sharepoint, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and scan petabytes of data at scale.

Understand

Uncover the sensitive, personal, and confidential information stored in emails, images, PDFs, messaging platforms, and network drives in minutes.

Action

Set the foundations to gain actionable insights to enforce privacy, governance, and security programs efficiently and automatically.

Automate the discovery, classification, and redaction of documents at scale

100,000

Words per second

1,200

Files processed per minute

72,000

Files processed per hour

How data discovery and classification works

Imperva DSF Data Discovery and Classification uses regular expression rules, pattern matching, and predefined name-based or content-based data classification types as it scans data store contents to tag matches it finds. Predefined policy packs operationalize compliance with regulations such as GDPR and CCPA. You can add customized, customer-specific data classification types, and scans can be scheduled and repeated to ensure ongoing awareness of the types of data within an organization's data stores.

For unstructured data, additional machine learning and natural language processing algorithms assist in locating files. Machine learning is further leveraged to label and assign attributes to the found data automatically.

	Structured Data	Unstructured Data	Semi-structured Data
Characteristics	Predefined data models Easy to search Text-based	No predefined data models Difficult to search text PDF, Images, Video	Loosely organized Meta-level structure that can contain unstructured data HTML, XML, JSON
Resides In	Relational databases Data warehouses Stored in rows and columns	Applications Data warehouses and lakes Stored in various forms	Relational databases Tagged-text format Stored in abstracts & figures
Examples	Dates Phone numbers Social security numbers Customer names Transactional information	Documents Emails and messages Conversation transcripts Image files Open-ended survey answers	Server logs Tweets organized by hashtags Email sorting by folders (inbox; sent; draft)

Data discovery and classification with no boundaries

With Imperva DSF you can standardize data security controls across large and complex enterprise data environments, so you have full visibility and centralized command of what is happening across all of your file stores and data assets, on-premises, in the hybrid cloud, and across multiple clouds.

Agents and agentless: Better together

If your organization is like most, your data repositories feature a mix of modern and legacy systems yet have the same reporting, compliance, and security requirements across all systems. You need the ongoing ability to collect data with the least impact on business processes.

Imperva’s flexible agent and agentless options provide the right tool at the right place regardless of an organization’s mix of new vs. old data repositories and offer the best of both worlds.

Support across multiple DBaaS and NoSQL platforms & services

Managing sensitive data

Imperva DSF Data Discovery and Classification comes “out-of-the-box” with common Sensitive Data Dictionary groups that identify sensitive data across all your data stores. Sensitive data dictionary groups are used to detect sensitive data such as telephone numbers, ID numbers, social security numbers, credit card numbers, etc. You can define security and audit policies that detect and prevent exposure of sensitive data to unauthorized users and configure Imperva DSF services to mask sensitive data in alerts, audits, and logs. Sensitive Data Dictionaries are also fully customizable, allowing you to classify any data pattern as sensitive.

Imperva DSF uses its sensitive data management capabilities in a variety of workflows:

Masking sensitive data in alerts. For example, masking credit card numbers in alert tables to avoid exposing the data to unauthorized administrative users.
Preventing data leakage in database responses. Identify sensitive data in SQL responses and either block those responses or generate an alert.
Auditing sensitive data extraction. Database transactions that contain sensitive data can automatically be audited to determine who accessed the sensitive data, how the sensitive data was accessed, the volume of sensitive data requests, etc.

Imperva Data Security Fabric protects all data types with a single system that delivers multiple business capabilities

Imperva Data Security Fabric is the first data-centric solution that enables your organization's security and compliance teams to quickly and easily secure sensitive data, no matter where it resides, with an integrated, proactive approach to visibility and predictive analytics.

Imperva Data Security Fabric is composed of cutting-edge orchestrated technical capabilities that work in unison to protect your data across your entire organization:

Data Discovery & Classification

Discover ungoverned data, classify all data, and assess vulnerabilities.

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Data Activity Monitoring

Gain complete visibility and ensure compliance with continuous monitoring, auditing and analyzing all data store and data types.

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Data Retention & Archive

Meet any data archiving requirement using the most cost efficient storage technology available.

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Data Risk Management

Detect and report non-compliant, risky, or malicious data access behavior across all of your data repositories enterprise-wide to accelerate remediation.

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