As privacy legislation ramps up worldwide, data discovery is now fundamental to effective management of personal and sensitive information.

Data management specialist Ground Labs is calling on businesses to rethink the importance of data discovery amid increasing data protection regulation and legislation worldwide. With legislation now enforced in over 130 countries, business leaders need to be aware not only of local requirements but also the laws of countries whose citizens’ data they are processing.

Alongside the shifting legislative landscape,Covid-19 forced most businesses into rapid change. While many organisations were already migrating services into the cloud for flexibility and cost benefits, this was accelerated during the pandemic to enable staff working from home to access business resources.

“As a result, the amount of data that is being stored on the endpoints has increased dramatically,” states Stephen Cavey, Co-founder of Ground Labs. “We’ve definitely seen the data of individuals being handled much more in people’s homes, and it’s an organisation’s responsibility to make sure that we’re somehow tracking that and then doing the necessary steps to lock it down and protect it.”

Data discovery must be considered a fundamental part of data management. With the huge change businesses have undergone over the last few years, it’s important to make sure that they understand exactly what affect these changes have had on their data environment. Stephen notes that, “up to 70% of organisations don’t seem to know where all their data is being stored.”

Advanced discovery scanning products like Ground Labs Enterprise Recon provide businesses with the ability to understand their data environment and manage it more efficiently. These solutions are customisable depending on the data of concern, based on industry sector, compliance standards and regulatory requirements.

Powered by GLASS Technology™, Enterprise Recon enables organisations to find and remediate personally identifiable information (PII) and sensitive information across the broadest range of structured and unstructured data – whether it’s stored across servers, on desktops, email or databases, on-premises and in the cloud.

With data protection becoming increasingly regulated, Stephen’s advice to business leaders is: “For any project or programme where you’re looking to comply with privacy laws, start with the data. If you start by identifying where all the data is in a systematic, evidence-based way that’s going to put you in a strong position to build a proper privacy program and secure the data that really exists.”

Further information

Ground Labs