How PKWARE’s Discovery Approach Supports Compliance and Prevents Data Leakage

When it comes to compliance with regulations, including HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS, and GLBA, how you discover sensitive data is critical. Many data discovery tools introduce unnecessary risk by moving, copying, or storing regulated data outside of the environments where it already resides. This expands the attack surface and increases the likelihood of data leakage and exposure.

Vendors and business associates account for a disproportionate share of breached PII, PCI, and PHI records. As a result, vendor environments are one of the largest risk surfaces for data leakage. Recent breaches demonstrate that the migration and ongoing storage of sensitive data within vendor environments significantly amplifies risk:

• Toyota (2024): Sensitive Toyota U.S. data, including employee information, contracts, and internal credentials, was stored within a third-party supplier’s environment. Attackers breached the supplier and leaked approximately 240GB of data, impacting Toyota despite its core systems remaining intact. The incident demonstrated how outsourcing data storage and processing expands the attack surface even when the primary enterprise has strong internal controls.
• Change Healthcare (2024–2025): As a healthcare technology and administrative services vendor, Change Healthcare routinely stored and processed PHI on behalf of thousands of providers. Claims and patient records aggregated within their platform were exfiltrated, impacting roughly 193 million individuals.
• Conduent (2025): Conduent’s vendor environment centralized PHI from multiple healthcare organizations. Hackers gained prolonged unauthorized access to backend infrastructure and exfiltrated PHI of more than 25 million individuals.
• PowerSchool (2024–2025): PowerSchool, a student information system vendor, centralized decades of student and staff records for school districts across North America. Attackers gained unauthorized access to their backend systems and exfiltrated records dating back to the 1980s. Long-term data retention within the vendor environment significantly increased the breach’s scope.
• Infosys McCamish (2024): Infosys McCamish, a financial and insurance administration services vendor, stored and processed PII on behalf of major financial institutions. A LockBit ransomware attack compromised their environment and exfiltrated customer data. The centralized nature of the vendor platform amplified the impact beyond a single organization.

As a security vendor, PKWARE intentionally avoids moving, copying, or storing customer data to prevent the creation of new exposure risk.

With PKWARE, data discovery occurs entirely within the customer’s own environment using an agent-based architecture. Sensitive data is scanned and identified in place, without being relocated, duplicated, or transmitted to external systems.

This is by design and a core principle of PKWARE’s commitment to data security. By keeping discovery local, PKWARE eliminates the need to move sensitive data into third-party platforms, reducing compliance complexity and materially lowering breach risk.

PKWARE does not retain the underlying data itself once the system identifies sensitive data. The platform surfaces insight and metadata required for security and compliance actions, without maintaining copies of the discovered content. Unlike vendor-hosted or centralized discovery models, our solution doesn’t create aggregated stores of sensitive data.

This distinction matters for regulatory compliance. Any system that stores replicated sensitive data becomes an additional system of record, expanding audit scope and amplifying exposure in the event of a compromise.

The breaches described above demonstrate how prolonged access to stored customer data within vendor systems can dramatically increase both impact and regulatory fallout. PKWARE’s discovery model avoids these pitfalls by ensuring data remains where it already exists, under the customer’s control, governed by existing security and compliance policies.

Because PKWARE never requires sensitive data to leave the customer’s environment, and does not store, relocate, or copy sensitive data, there is no external repository of sensitive data that could be exposed through a third-party breach. No external organization sees or handles customer data during discovery.

This approach directly aligns with core compliance principles by minimizing data exposure across the data lifecycle and preventing discovery tools from becoming unintended aggregation points for regulated data.

By discovering sensitive data safely and in place, PKWARE enables organizations to take informed, compliant action to secure the data within their environment. Organizations can encrypt, mask, redact, quarantine, or delete sensitive data. Discovery becomes a foundation for protection, not another source of exposure.

Compliance isn’t just about finding sensitive data. It’s about finding it without creating new risk. Our agent-based, in environment discovery delivers the visibility organizations need while keeping data secure in their environment.

See how it works by scheduling a demo with our team today.

By discovering sensitive data safely and in place, PKWARE enables organizations to take informed, compliant action to secure the data within their environment. Organizations can encrypt, mask, redact, quarantine, or delete sensitive data. Discovery becomes a foundation for protection, not another source of exposure.

Compliance isn’t just about finding sensitive data. It’s about finding it without creating new risk. Our agent-based, in environment discovery delivers the visibility organizations need while keeping data secure in their environment.

See how it works by scheduling a demo with our team today.

Moving to policy-driven data protection delivers clear advantages. You can meet compliance mandates, eliminate usability issues, and protect data wherever it lives or moves.

PK Protect is a policy-based platform that enables consistent data discovery and remediation. It works across the organization through centrally managed policies. Simplify security on endpoints, servers, on-prem, cloud, databases, data lakes, applications, and even the mainframe. See how it works by requesting a demo today.