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Struggling with Unstructured Data? Data Security PIatform is the Answer

How to Protect Unstructured DataIntroduction

Today, the majority of digitally stored information consists of unstructured data. This includes office documents, CAD/CAE files, PDFs, emails, images, videos, blogs, customer support chat logs, and social media.

 

 

What is Unstructured Data?

Unstructured data is information lacking a fixed format or organization, making it challenging to manage and protect using traditional security measures. This data can include text, images, video, and email, often stored in various locations and formats. Unstructured data is typically more difficult to secure because it does not neatly fit into a database and contains sensitive information that is harder to identify and monitor. This presents challenges for organizations to leverage all their information. Ensuring the security of unstructured data requires specialized tools and strategies to detect, classify, and protect it from unauthorized access, loss, or breaches.

 

Other Challenges with Unstructured Data

Unstructured data also poses numerous security and regulatory compliance challenges. Traditional network, device, and application cybersecurity and risk management approaches do not address the problem. This coverage gap is why storing and sharing sensitive information in free-form documents creates numerous opportunities for leakage or exfiltration of proprietary or otherwise sensitive data. Confidential files containing intellectual propertyPII, or printouts of HIPAA-protected personal health information (PHI) are three examples of unstructured data potentially at risk of unauthorized access due to negligent or malicious insider behavior or cyber-attacks.

Sensitive unstructured data falls into two broad categories: regulated and unregulated. The adequate protection of regulated unstructured data is required by law (examples: GDPRCCPA). Unregulated data includes both business-sensitive and publicly known information. Determining what content requires protection is left to the discretion of the business that owns, stores, or processes it.

 

How to Protect Unstructured Data?

Unstructured data security involves the strategies and technologies used to protect data that does not conform to a specific format, such as text documents, image files, videos, emails, and other forms of digital content. Because unstructured data is often stored in diverse and dispersed locations, securing it presents unique challenges compared to structured data. Unstructured data security focuses on identifying, classifying, and safeguarding this data, ensuring that sensitive information is protected from unauthorized access or breaches. It includes measures like encryptionaccess controlsdata loss prevention, and monitoring tools to detect and respond to potential security threats while maintaining compliance with relevant regulations. The goal is to secure unstructured data throughout its lifecycle, from creation to deletion, without disrupting access for authorized users.

 

Discover and Classify all sensitive data

The best way to fortify and scale an unstructured data security and privacy infrastructure is to automatically classify and encrypt files and documents as users create them.  Fasoo embeds a unique identifier (Tag) into each file, so you don’t need to rescan to determine its sensitivity. Adding access control and traceability through a protection policy (Pac) allows you to efficiently comply with privacy regulations, including GDPRHIPAACCPA, NYDFS, and PCI DSS. Centralized policy management simplifies discovery and classification by not requiring users to make decisions on data sensitivity. It can identify and control sensitive files as soon as they appear without user intervention, ensuring data is always protected and under your control, regardless of location.

  • Discover sensitive data in databases and files on servers, in the cloud, or endpoint devices using patterns, keywords, file types, or attributes in pre-defined or custom detection rule templates. Protection rules immediately classify and add a label to files, encrypt with a unique identifier, quarantine, or assign adaptive access control to authorized users.
  • View detected files from a centralized console to understand the type of sensitive data you have and the last time a user accessed it. Data visualization graphs help you understand data location, file types, patterns detected, and those files that may be targeted for deletion, archive, or immediate encryption based on the last time accessed or sensitivity.
  • Insert a tag, move, encrypt, or delete unwanted or obsolete files depending on the sensitive content contained inside. You can add granular permissions to those files that require the highest level of protection and control.

Fasoo Data Radar provides a dashboard of the location, usage, and encryption status of sensitive documents. It helps you visualize data lineage and easily manage and track the overall security and flow of data.

 

Protect all file types

Protect, control, and track sensitive documents at rest, in transit, and in use persistently on any device at any time throughout the entire document lifecycle.  You can limit editing, printing, and sharing sensitive content with unauthorized users inside and outside your organization by encrypting files and adding granular controls.

Fasoo Enterprise DRM helps you manage insider threats, prevent data breaches, and enforce the highest level of protection for sensitive, unstructured data.  The solution meets the security requirements of different stages in the document lifecycle. By leveraging behavioral analytics and providing insights for policy optimization, Fasoo helps customers cut through the complexity and delivers the most secure solution for their files

  • Protect, control, track, and manage any document format, including file derivatives, to meet your security requirements regardless of file location. By encrypting and assigning dynamic access control to sensitive files, you ensure that only authorized users can access the content inside.
  • Deploy and manage security policies centrally to protect documents as users create or download them from information systems, the cloud, or any internal document repository without interrupting user workflows.
  • Reduce the impact on productivity by simplifying the management of exceptions, leveraging behavioral analytics, and providing intelligence about security policy optimization.

 

Audit Trails

Track and analyze all document usage, including file derivatives, to understand the full lifecycle of sensitive documents.  This key component of data security posture management (DSPM) provides the location and encryption status of unstructured data, which allows you to assess the level of data security within your organization.

Fasoo Integrated Log Manager (FILM) collects document usage logs and tracking IDs through its proprietary MLB (Micro Log Block) technology.  It tracks all changes and user history from the initial creation of the document to its disposal to help you visualize data lineage. Through detailed tracking of documents, you can mitigate the risk of data leakage by trusted insiders. A dashboard of the location, usage, and encryption status of your sensitive documents helps you visualize data lineage and easily manage and track the overall security and flow of data. You can establish a more efficient and thorough security policy by managing logs from all security solutions in one place.

  • Trace data activity through an intuitive dashboard showing the creation, location, usage, and encryption status of all documents, including source code and CAD files.​
  • Identify document creation, distribution, change history, and suspicious leak behavior, including redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT) data.
  • Collect and analyze all data usage logs from Fasoo solutions in a centralized location in real-time to identify meaningful security insights.​
  • Optimize security policies to detect and monitor unusual file usage behaviors of targeted users and groups. Administrators receive an automatic notification when abnormal events are detected to mitigate data leaks.
  • Determine growth and trends of protected and unprotected files in the cloud, on end-points, and other storage locations. You can visualize data lineage and identify the overall history of all data.

 

Conclusion

Protecting unstructured data is easy when using the Fasoo Data Security Platform.  It identifies potential risks and vulnerabilities, implements proper security controls, and maintains data visibility throughout its lifecycle.  The platform helps you enable data security posture management (DSPM) while overcoming the complexities inherent in traditional perimeter-based security approaches. Fasoo combines data security capabilities into a purpose-built, highly automated, centrally managed, data-centric platform. Organizations secure their data better and more easily with Fasoo.

Talk to a specialist about how the Fasoo Data Security Platform could benefit you.

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