“My biggest concern is the full optimization of my current AIP/MIP solution within and outside of the Azure platform for the protection and management of our sensitive data.”
CISO, Pharmaceutical Wholesaler
Customer Challenge
With a rapidly growing network of distributors and offices, a leading pharmaceutical supplier was in desperate need to find a unified solution for the protection of their HIPAA and other sensitive data. The demands of their customers for rapid digital transformation of business services was putting added pressure on an already understaffed and overworked information security office. Without readily available money or qualified personnel, and a limited budget, the CISO required an integrated solution that would optimize his current Microsoft Azure Information Protection (AIP) platform.
The Mission: Optimized Data Management Solution
With federally mandated HIPAA and HITECH compliance requirements compounded by their ever‑growing database of structured and unstructured sensitive data, the CISO of this pharmaceutical wholesale distributor needed a viable and thorough solutions that would seamlessly optimize the efforts that his team had already made using the Microsoft AIP application. The following list was presented to Spirion by the CISO on behalf of his information security team.
- The solution should strengthen the existing AIP process with greater data discovery and classification accuracy.
- The solution must keep and apply the existing AIP/MIP document and email labels.
- The solution must classify current AIP/MIP documents based on their existing labels.
- The solution must automatically reclassify as well as report on updated files as well as bulk re‑label files based on policy changes.
- The solution must seamlessly work in not only and Azure cloud, but on-premise databases and shared solutions as well as endpoints including non-Microsoft applications.
Effective Command and Control of Sensitive Data
With over 800 endpoints to manage and over 150 TB of data on an array of server farms, the Spirion solution was able to fully satisfy all of the above requirements. As a risk management solution Spirion easily achieved rapid discovery of all structured and unstructured sensitive data while supporting classification rates of under 2% in false positives, saving the CISO’s team both time and money.
Managing a global footprint, Spirion provided worldwide tracking of asset usage including access permissions and document protection for not only all Microsoft 360 applications and collateral but all other operating systems and applications. This global presence allowed the CISO’s team to revoke document access on a worldwide basis as well as a broad suit of automated remediation actions based on applied policies.
From a data loss prevention perspective, Spirion provided the automatic classification of newly created sensitive data including accurately classifying or reclassifying sensitive data with the appropriate AIP/MIP labels on a global basis. All DLP actions were supported with in-depth and real time analysis and reporting via an intuitive dashboard providing for a single pain of glass approach.
After a full review by the CISO’s staff, including interviews with various departments worldwide as well as conducting their own audits, the areas of their current AIP/MIP solution that were in need of optimization were clearly defined. By implementing a broad scale proof of concept (POC), the organization was able to create a through analysis and review comparing the Spirion solution against each of the areas that AIP/MIP presented a challenge.
The results were summarized in the following table.
