Spirion Enhances Depth and Breadth of Privacy-Grade Discovery, Classification and Remediation for Sensitive Data

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., April 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Spirion, a pioneer in data protection and compliance, today announced the release of major new enhancements to its Sensitive Data Platform, providing enterprises greater flexibility in how they find, organize, understand and act upon sensitive information to bolster governance, security and privacy programs and meet obligations under California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other data privacy regulations.

Today’s release increases the depth of Spirion’s purposeful data classification schema to support the business context of sensitive information and how it’s being used, so organizations can better control and act to protect it through automated remediation. It also extends the breadth of Spirion’s accurate data discovery to encompass new AnyScan™ connectors for big data and cloud repositories including Snowflake, Salesforce, Confluence, Jira, Microsoft Planner, and a collection of Apache Hadoop sources. In addition, organizations can now host Spirion Sensitive Data Platform on their own private Azure cloud subscription.

“Context-rich classification imparts important insights into how an organization’s data is being used. By having this level of context, enterprises are well equipped to understand their data, know where it is located, identify its contents, and ultimately, make better decisions around it. Those decisions may affect privacy, security, governance, or all three,” states Ryan O’Leary, Research Manager, Privacy and Legal Technology for IDC.

“Data privacy and security require more than just knowing where data is,” said Rob Server, Spirion Field CTO. “It’s also about gaining greater clarity and transparency around how data is being used. Today’s new platform enhancements underscore Spirion’s commitment to finding sensitive data, wherever it lives, with unrivaled accuracy and protecting it against unauthorized access, use and modification through automated, context-rich classification and remediation to reduce financial, regulatory, and legal risks.”

Understand How Data is Being Used Through Context-Rich Data Classification

Data classification has always been a cornerstone of mature data governance programs. With growing threat surface risks arising from digital transformation, cloud migration and work from home initiatives, automated classification has become essential to an enterprise’s ability to understand their data, know where it is located, identify its contents — and ultimately make better decisions around it.

In addition to its current sensitivity classification (which sets confidentiality level), Spirion has added five new persistent classification categories out-of-the-box to give organizations more flexibility in how they can organize and precisely define their data to stay compliant, which include:

• Process: provides context around business processes where the data is being used.
• Purpose: identifies why a business is collecting information about an individual.
• Preference: informs any customer preferences surrounding how the data can be used.
• Regulatory: associates any regulations that would govern the data, such as CPRA, GDPR, PCI, or HIPAA.
• Custom: allows organizations to easily create their own custom categories; for instance, classifying data by location of subjects, third-party processors, etc.

By auto-classifying documents based on content and context, organizations will gain additional insight about their data and how it is being used, so they can better understand its risk and enact appropriate controls to protect it. Spirion’s context-rich classification playbooks give organizations the ability to act on classifications to enforce controls through automated remediation.

Find Sensitive Information No Matter Where it Lives with AnyScan Connectors

Spirion has entered into a licensing agreement with CData, a leading provider of standards-based drivers for data integration, to expand the ability of Sensitive Data Platform to detect, classify and remediate sensitive data across more systems to ensure compliance with security, privacy, and regulatory mandates. The relationship will enable Spirion’s customers to scan for sensitive and restricted information in more than 200 disparate big data, SaaS, NoSQL, RDBMS, collaboration, ERP, accounting, and CRM data locations through plug-and-play AnyScan connectors designed to reduce integration time, cost and complexity.

Sensitive Data Platform’s initial AnyScan connectors provide connectivity for Salesforce, Snowflake, Jira, Confluence, Microsoft Planner, Apache Hadoop, Apache Hive, Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), Apache HBase, Apache Phoenix, and Apache Parquet. New connectors will be tested and released on a quarterly basis.

Self-Host Spirion on Your Own Private Azure Cloud

Spirion’s Sensitive Data Platform, Sensitive Data Finder and Sensitive Data Watcher solutions can now be hosted on a customer’s private Azure cloud subscription. This approach gives customers all the benefits of cloud services (cost savings, security, less maintenance) while retaining control over their Spirion tenant and data. To self-host Spirion on a private Azure cloud, customers must have an active Azure tenant running on Linux OS. The set-up takes less than 30-minutes to configure.

About Spirion
Spirion has relentlessly solved real data protection problems since 2006 with accurate, contextual discovery of structured and unstructured data; purposeful classification; automated real-time risk remediation; and powerful analytics and dashboards to give organizations greater visibility into their most at-risk data and assets. Spirion’s Privacy-Grade data protection software enables organizations to reduce risk exposure, gain visibility into their data footprint, improve business efficiencies and decision-making while facilitating compliance with data protection laws and regulations.