Security operations teams are drowning in false alerts. The average SecOps team receives approximately 11,000 alerts every day—one-third of which are false positive. This noise level is crippling SecOps productivity, creating data blindness throughout the enterprise, and escalating the risk of compliance infractions.
When it comes to protecting what matters most—your organization’s sensitive data—Spirion believes that accuracy is everything. After all, you cannot protect what you cannot find. Recently, we decided to put our money where our mouth is and put our bold proclamation to the test.
Spirion commissioned The Tolly Group, a premier third-party IT testing lab, to benchmark just how effective Spirion is in accurately discovering personal, sensitive, and regulated data.
The results: 98.5% dead-on accuracy.
Industry-leading data detection accuracy: validated
The Tolly Group tested the speed and ease with which Spirion could be installed and configured to maximize personal data detection while minimizing the number of false positives through the use of flexible, customized data classification filters. The tests also demonstrated the platform’s automatic remediation capabilities, which do not require a third-party data loss prevention (DLP) solution.
The benchmark test goal was to use the filtering configuration capabilities of Spirion to maximize the accuracy of personal data detection. Testing illustrated that Spirion could deliver 98.5% accuracy in a Tolly-provided document corpus with filtering configuration and tuning accomplished in under four hours.
For CEO Kevin Coppins, the results come as no surprise: “The Tolly Group’s comprehensive assessment reinforces what our customers have been telling us—that Spirion leads the industry with the most accurate data discovery and the lowest rates of false positives.”
Maximizing personal data detection while avoiding false positives
Highlights from The Tolly Group’s evaluation include:
- Data detection accuracy: Spirion demonstrated impressive flexibility in detecting personal, sensitive, and regulated data with 98% accuracy—even when contained inside image documents.
- System installation: Spirion was ready to scan in less than one hour. In comparison, some solutions require significant customization before scanning and discovery begin.
- Custom filter configuration: While Spirion provides a rich set of filters for data selection, it is easy to configure custom filters. Tolly engineers were able to build a custom filter definition in just a few minutes.
- Automatic remediation: Spirion automates the response taken when vulnerabilities are detected. Tolly engineers tested a range of actions that included destroying, redacting, and quarantining sensitive data.
The importance of accuracy
Kevin Tolly, founder of The Tolly Group, stresses, “False positive alerts are among the most significant and costly challenges that we see security operations teams struggling with every day, leading to lost productivity, low data visibility, and heightened risk for compliance infractions. As the amount of data continues to proliferate, accuracy becomes increasingly important.”
In putting Spirion through its paces, Tolly observes, “Throughout our battery of tests, Spirion demonstrated impressive flexibility in detecting personal data, even when contained within an image document. While comprehensive in its ability to accurately detect and remediate sensitive data, Spirion is equally impressive with its speed of installation and ease in configuring custom filters to identify data attributes that are unique to an organization.”
Accuracy you can trust
By automating the data discovery and classification process, Spirion can shrink and label an enterprise’s sensitive data footprint, minimizing the time SecOps analysts spend investigating false alerts. Spirion separates important information from irrelevant information and protects what matters the most, providing accurate and actionable insights that SecOps analysts can trust.
Additionally, fewer false-positives make combing through data exponentially more productive, allowing security operations teams to focus on more strategic and impactful business activities.
