Privacy Risk Management – What We Do

Today’s companies face the constant potential for data compromise, particularly through greater risk of data mishandling than ever before. Although low storage costs enable your company to store as much data as you want, this also increases your financial and legal risks. Ardent reduces organizational risk by identifying, mapping, and minimizing data footprint. Learn more about Ardent and how our product suits your business risk.

Data Risks Your Business Faces Today

Today organizations collect and retain vast amounts of extensive personal data. Exposure of highly sensitive data presents financial and reputational risks universally understood across business and government. Increasing exposure of data accessed through phishing emails, malware, and ransomware attacks underscores the resolve of threat actors to weaponize private data. Data protection officers and compliance managers need an effective strategy to address these risks and meet privacy regulations. Addressing unauthorized access is only one part of the solution. Reducing available data for access is critical. It is vital to assess critical data assets and design a data-centric security architecture to make your organization resilient to common attacks. Implementing effective data minimization and elimination procedures and continuous monitoring is another critical aspect of protecting personal data.

By minimizing data, you lower business risks. These risks include:

  • Data loss
  • Financial liability
  • Business credibility
  • Regulatory penalties
  • Criminal negligence

The Privacy Risk Reduction

IDENTIFY & MAP

The initial step toward reducing business risk is to complete a data inventory at the file level. Most organizations do not have a comprehensive view of where PII data is located and it can be dispersed across IT teams. Ardent discovers files located across the organization and the machine learning engine analyzes the files to determine which files are candidates for minimization. Essential attributes include: creation, modification, used, bytes, document type and classified by sensitivity. Ardent applies machine learning to categorize risk producing a list of suitable candidate files for permanent disposal. Ardent identifies excess data in seconds, including PII, using metadata of files. Machine learning processes are much faster than traditional methods of content scanning. The results are summarized a heat map of Key Risk Indicators (KRI) of discovered and identified candidates.

MINIMIZE

The second step after data discovery and identification are completed is initiating the remediation process. Remediation options include secure deletion of data, moving data to another location, and archiving it making it off-line. Ardent’s software-based deletion solution utilizes DoD compliant algorithms and sanitizes data on an on-going basis and not just at the end of its life. Partial data cleansing is necessary to reduce unwanted data. A record of disposition is available to demonstrate regulatory compliance outlined in FISMA, CCPA and GDPR. Data minimization should be a standard data management practice as it reduces PII exposure and associated financial liability. Data threat remediation options include deletion and relocation to more secure locations. Ardent uses a software-based deletion process based on algorithms compliant with U.S. Dept. of Defense. Data-at-risk is sanitized beyond end of life tagging. Most importantly, Ardent summarizes document deletions to provide evidence of compliance outlined in FISMA, CCPA and GDPR.

AUTOMATE COMPLIANCE

After initial identification and remediation steps Ardent automates continuous monitoring. Excess data is minimized at regular intervals providing full data lifecycle support. The Ardent scanning process eliminates unwanted data at the end of the SDLC and DevSecOps life cycle thus securing the supply chain. Testing and validation environments benefit by removing often misplaced PII data. Compliance processes are streamlined by automating regularly scheduled scans and remediations.

Ardent Your Data Privacy Partner

 

For more information, contact Ardent at 833.888.7853. Start today with the right toolsets for reducing business risks.