Illinois College Makes Data Privacy Program Smarter with Spirion

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (PRWEB), April 28, 2020 — Spirion, a pioneer in building solutions that enable companies around the globe to take the critical first step towards data security and privacy, today announced the successful roll-out of its Sensitive Data Manager solution at Illinois College, one of the nation’s top liberal arts schools. The 191-year old institution turned to Spirion to take its data privacy and compliance programs to the next level, effectively moving them beyond the manual identification and securement of sensitive student data to an automated and persistent approach. The resulting solution has given the college’s small IT staff greater agility, helping them to comply with new regulations, such as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which now requires auditing to ensure safeguards are in place to protect students’ personally identifiable information (PII).

In preparing for their upcoming audit, Illinois College needed to identify where the personal information of students and their guardians resided so they could ensure its protection. The critical first step they took in automating the college’s security and compliance programs was to deploy Spirion solutions. The system scanned 28 terabytes of data on servers and approximately 250 faculty, staff and lab endpoints, performing highly accurate searches of both structured and unstructured data. The solution accurately and persistently discovers, classifies, and protects sensitive data campus-wide, from the network to the cloud, including students’ PII, protected health information, and credit card numbers.

“Spirion is extremely powerful, giving us full visibility into where all of our sensitive data lives and surfacing identity-centric data, bank account numbers, and confidential budget information in hard-to-find files located on several computers,” said Marc Benner, Assistant Chief Information Officer at Illinois College. “When it comes to protecting what matters most, we don’t want fast and easy; we want accurate and persistent – and that’s what Spirion delivers.”

“From GLBA to HIPAA, higher education institutions must comply with multiple data security regulations to protect an ever-expanding body of student and staff sensitive data,” said Kevin Coppins, President and CEO at Spirion. “We are pleased to provide the critical first step for Illinois College’s security and compliance programs, helping to evolve their privacy practice to the next level. By giving Marc and his team greater data visibility, we can aid their strategic decisions for protection and actions while monitoring progress without burdening their IT staff or risking human error.”

Illinois College has followed a staged approach to automating its security and compliance programs. The first phase concentrated on getting all their data privacy processes automated through Spirion’s data discovery and persistent classification capabilities. The next stage, currently underway, will define and automate protection actions for data according to compliance regulations and campus rules. Such remediation will include electronically shredding unnecessary information and quarantining files to a more secure location.

About Spirion
Spirion (https://www.spirion.com) is a pioneer in designing the critical first step of data security and privacy through its data discovery, persistent classification, and behavior software and services. Since 2006, thousands of organizations across all industries worldwide have reduced their sensitive data footprint and proactively minimized the risks, costs, and reputational damage of successful cyberattacks and regulatory violations. The company was recently ranked by CIOReview magazine as one of the “20 Most Promising Compliance Technology Solution Providers of 2019” and was named a Grand Trophy Winner in the 16th Annual 2020 Info Security PG Global Excellence Awards.