How To Take Control of Your Data in 2023

PKWARE doesn’t make data prettier. We don’t make users smarter. We don’t make users faster, or quicker, or more efficient. We don’t magically help users do their job better.

So what do we do? We keep companies out of the news cycle and off the front page of The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and keep your information safe.

We help you take control of sensitive information and reduce the risk of a breach by protecting the most important organizational asset: data. Here’s how.

The Data Management Challenge

Managing data is chaos. High velocity files are created, modified, moved, touched, changed, and then sent to all sorts of users and destinations. Identifying and protecting that information is intensely difficult. It’s wondering if what you thought was important is actually important, and if the place where you left the important stuff is actually safe and secure. It’s crawling through hard drives, cloud repositories, and databases to make sure you keep your users protected from themselves, your data safe from harm, your applications secure, and your adversaries at bay.

How do you do that? You take control. Find what’s important, what’s sensitive, what’s proprietary. Report it, visualize it, and analyze it. And of course, protect it. All of it.

Protect it by automatically moving it to a safe location. Protect it by programmatically concealing what’s sensitive and unique to you with length- and format-preserving masking or encryption. Protect it by systemically de-identifying what you have with similar, useful, non-sensitive replacement data.

Find and Fix—Automatically

Remember that security and privacy are not just about you. They’re about your users and your customers. It’s about their confidence in using your products, their comfort in using your platforms. Their excitement about sharing what’s most important to them—and doing it safely.

At PKWARE, we believe that your data is your most valuable asset. Security isn’t just about who’s trying to enter your perimeter. Protection isn’t only about how your users are interacting with your applications. It’s about the actual data itself. That data includes your proprietary ideas, your design documents, your most personal and important private information.

Our purpose-built solutions identify what’s most important to your organization and present it to you in an easily consumable graphic and textual formats. And just as importantly, we let you automatically remediate any of the data we find. We find it, we fix it. It’s really that simple.

Why PKWARE?

So you might be wondering why this message is unique. Well, it isn’t. If there are 500 vendors you’ve researched, 495 of them will tell you they do discovery, and 450 of them will say they remediate. The real question is: When a solution tells you something is sensitive, is it? How accurate is the discovery? How confident are you with the results? How sure are you that there isn’t sensitive data left unprotected in your organization?

At PKWARE, it’s all about the results. Our discovery is more than regex.  It’s more than finding a 16-digit number in a file in the cloud, or in a field in a spreadsheet, or a column in a database and calling it a credit card. We need to be sure that it in fact is a credit card. That means running a Luhn test against that number. That means checking that data for patterns in “strings,” in “grammar,” and in “context” to be confident of our answer.

• Patterns in “strings” means handling data elements expressed in different formats.
• Patterns in “grammar” means differentiating the word “April” as a name versus a street address versus the calendar month.
• Patterns in “context” means PK Protect can identify an element present only in the vicinity of other elements, like a ZIP code.

And searching for patterns mean our software isn’t guessing for the right answer. Add in AI and machine learning, and we can identify non “well formed” items, like European addresses, as well. And after we’ve done our best to give you the best results, PKWARE even provides you confidence scoring, which gives you our conviction in what we found, helping you decide what you need to do next.

Once we’ve found sensitive data, we can fix it. Fixing it may be something as simple as automatically moving it from a downloads folder to a secure area, without the user taking manual action. It could mean creating a rule that targets multiple repositories and locations so that the software will encrypt a sensitive document found on a desktop, on a server, and in the cloud from one single policy. It means masking data in a database, in a column, in a row, in a field. PK Protect boasts over 40 different kinds of masking, and will even de-identify information for analysis.

Discover and Defend with PK Protect

PKWARE performs both discovery and protection through the very same interface. The same place you find the data, you can fix it. One-stop shopping. And when you’re done, PKWARE will deliver those results both to our own dashboards and reports, as well as send it to other reporting tools that already exist in your organization.

There are a lot of software vendors that will say they can help you. What PKWARE will do is help you help yourself. We’ll help you identify what’s unique and protect what’s important—all without changing your business workflows—so that you can keep working without interruption.

PKWARE is about visibility and protection, but mostly we are about assurance. See how we do it with a free demo.