It is absolutely impossible to achieve compliance and apply data controls without knowing what data you hold and where that data resides.

If your organisation is spending hundreds of thousands on Zero Trust, XDR and Vulnerability Management but you still don’t know where the data is then how do you plan to deploy this proverbial Swiss army of tooling? If you were asked tomorrow to prove compliance against a new regulation in your industry, would you be confident of finding the data in question?

Every data security or privacy challenge must start with understanding and discovering the data to give you the best possible outcomes. HANDD help organisations select and implement the best tools available based on their requirements to get that visibility and meet the required outcomes of any Data Discovery and security project.

Deploying a Data Discovery platform into your organisation will provide dashboards and reports on the most valuable assets: the data you hold. How much of it exists in various locations, what of that is sensitive and should be protected beyond the controls currently applied? Relying on your user community to make the right decision on data storage and protection is folly. Having a system which will ratify those decisions, tidy up the errors and provide the ability to remediate any problems unearthed is much more efficient, systems are far better at implementing policy than humans.

Consider all the potential areas for data to exist in your organisation: local disk of clients, the classic file share structure, SharePoint, OneDrive, email inboxes, Azure Blobs or S3 buckets. Our projects and risk assessments always discover data types in the places they’re never designed to be stored. Without knowing this the risk overhead is infinite. It’s theoretically impossible to keep the data safe or achieve compliance against data legislation such as GDPR whilst the data remains in the dark.

HANDD have previously assisted organisations to discover, report and catalogue data stores in the tens of Terabytes across legacy systems, on premise repositories and cloud infrastructure for organisations as large as ten thousand users spanning multiple geographies. Giving them the visibility needed to achieve compliance, learn about the information they hold, it’s risk and start to manage remediating some of the issues they’re now aware of.

We’ve worked with customers in the Finance industry to identify, target and clean up data pertinent to PCI-DSS. Organisations in Housing and Insurance to help tackle GDPR and give them the right tools to deliver DSAR in the timescales required as well as organisations in manufacturing to realise where Intellectual Property resides and stop it being propagated to less secure areas of the business.

HANDD has a team of security specialists who can advise on the best technology to assist your organisation.  If you’d like to discuss this further, call us on +44 (0) 845 643 4063 or email us at info@handd.co.uk