Addressing Information Security with Deep Examination of Content

Information security is at the top of the list when it comes to developing key strategies as part of any Information Governance program. The key is to manage content risk factors while strengthening understanding of the information contained in content. Is your organization addressing the RIGHT things?

Securing Confidential Customer Data

Information security can impact the fate of an organization, trust being one of the integral keys to customer loyalty. While it’s easy to throw money at strengthening firewalls and implementing other traditional security protocols, these tend to be reactive measures and the underlying risk remains undetected. Sometimes what draws attention to the problem is a negative event, like the exposure of personally identifiable information (PII). These events tend to be highlighted in the media, as we saw not too long ago with the Panama Papers story. This is not an isolated incident; In fact there were more than 256 million records breached in the first four months of 2016, the highest EVER for the same period in the preceding three years. We are on pace to see 750 million records breached in 2016. The need to address this problem has never been stronger. However, there’s an even bigger problem lurking beneath it.

When data leaks are dragged into the public forum, the situation wreaks havoc on an organization’s reputation, its employees and of course the individuals whose private information has been revealed. When confidential customer information is exposed it’s assumed the company hasn’t put adequate security measures in place. The damage can be irreparable, risking the integrity of the organization’s brand.

The problem isn’t the firewall. 40% of breaches come from within the perimeter, which indicates the problem is the approach to managing unstructured content like data contained in emails, social media, Microsoft^® Word^® documents, CAD diagrams, etc. Identifying electronic content that contains PII, and non-public information (NPI) including confidential commercial information (CCI) is a big piece of the Information Governance pie, but equaled by the need for remediation and management of that information.

Addressing Risk with Ongoing Holistic Information Governance

“We had business intelligence trapped in our email system that we didn’t even know was there. The extraction of that information was vital to our organization both for addressing compliance and moving projects forward.”

This customer statement is something we hear all the time. Working with customers who need to get a handle on their unstructured content, we’ve discovered that many Fortune 500 organizations don’t know where a disproportionate chunk of their content is. And, that information could be (usually is) flowing throughout the organization and outside its walls. This is a scary prospect when confidential information could so easily fall into the wrong hands. Therefore, putting a bigger fence around data doesn’t work. That’s the reality. We find customers are challenged with:

• A volume of content that is overwhelming and the realization that it is not all information of value
• Not knowing what content they have which is exposing them to great risk
• The requirement to retain multiple vendors to find, secure, classify, and archive content throughout the organization at a huge cost and not necessarily the right impact or outcome

Automated Identification, Examination and Organization of Content

Organizations turn to Adlib because company leadership is often concerned with not only identifying and securing content, but also implementing a system to help them identify, redact, classify, and store unstructured content automatically to make it accurate and scalable on an ongoing basis. Accomplishing this with one approach, and one vendor, is a huge advantage.

Our approach takes a holistic view of each piece of content: ingesting it properly, extracting data of value from it, classifying it (and bucketing PII appropriately during the process), and archiving it for the long term. Throughout this process, companies can ensure that their assets are protected and future-proofed.

A holistic approach allows our customers to not only find and secure their confidential information, but address other content concerns as well, strengthening their data and enabling stronger business decision-making through these improvements:

• Valuable content is retained and accessible for as long as is required
• Redundant content is de-duplicated, delivering a cleansed content library
• PII is identified and classified; a future-forward process for dealing with it in the future is put in place
• Multi-layered redaction is applied
• Previously “dark data” is exposed for content analysis
• Critical customer response time is accelerated, creating competitive advantage

With one technology vendor, and one approach, all of these results can be simultaneously achieved—the organization now knows what content it has and an audit trail has been created for good measure.

Knowing what you have is a powerful thing. By identifying and examining all content that comes into the enterprise in an efficient automated process, organizations can achieve information governance goals and feel confident that sensitive information is protected and content can be leveraged to aid better decision making.

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With its sophisticated Content Elevation Process™, Adlib is transforming the way organizations around the world in Energy, Life Sciences, Insurance, and Banking overcome Information Governance challenges. Integrating with key business tools, Adlib’s solutions enable improved migration, compliance, privacy and security, digital transformation, and classification. By unlocking the value in unstructured content, we empower our customers to derive greater business insight for critical decision-making.