Advances in video technology have made it cheaper and easier than ever before for organizations to record their activities. Surveillance video is being generated globally at a rate of more than 2,000 petabytes a day, in addition to millions of videos of internal meetings, product demonstrations, and other activities.
PKWARE’s PK Protect provides an automated workflow for detecting and protecting video content as soon as it appears on a server or user device. Video files can be tagged and encrypted with no manual intervention, ensuring that only authorized users can access the files. Download our solution overview to learn more.
Video Is Sensitive Data That Nobody Classifies
Almost every video a corporation or government agency creates reveals something worth protecting: business plans, security practice, product development or how an operation actually runs.
It is rarely treated that way, because classification programmes are built around documents. A recorded strategy meeting is subject to the same obligations as the deck presented in it, and considerably less likely to be covered by policy.
The Volume Is the Reason Manual Handling Fails
Surveillance video alone is generated globally at more than 2,000 petabytes a day, alongside millions of recordings of internal meetings, product demonstrations and routine activity.
Recording has become cheap and easy, which means the volume grows regardless of whether anyone has decided how to govern it. No manual review process survives contact with that rate of creation.
Detection and Protection as One Automated Step
As soon as a file is added or modified on a server or user device, it is checked against organizational policy. Where it meets the criteria, for example by file type or by metadata tags, persistent encryption is applied using a predefined key.
Only authorized users can decrypt and open the file afterwards, and that holds if the video is copied to cloud storage or moved somewhere else entirely. The protection is a property of the file rather than of its location.
No Manual Intervention Means No Missed Files
Tagging and encryption happen without anyone being asked to act, which removes the failure mode every content protection scheme shares: the file that was never classified because the person who created it did not think to.
Discovery, classification and protection running as a single automated process is what gives an organization complete control over video content rather than control over the videos somebody remembered.
Encryption Inside the Applications That Create Video
Some video never lands on a file server in a reviewable state. It is captured, processed and stored by a purpose-built application, and protecting it after the fact is too late.
A software development kit, available in most common programming languages, allows AES-256 encryption to be built directly into those applications with only a few additional lines of code. That puts the protection at the point of capture, which is the only place it can be guaranteed.
Why This Is Worth Doing Before an Incident
Video carries context that documents do not. A recording shows a facility, a process, a system on screen and who was in the room, and it is far harder to assess the damage from a leaked video than from a leaked file.
Encrypting it automatically closes an exposure most organizations have not measured, at a cost that falls entirely on the tooling rather than on the people creating the content.
Retention is the related question. Video accumulates faster than anything else an organization stores, and most of it has no defined lifetime. Knowing what exists is the prerequisite for deciding what to keep, and deletion remains the cheapest protection available.