In today’s world, data breaches are an increasingly common occurrence. The greatest financial damage typically comes when breaches expose sensitive data, such as social security numbers, credit card data, health information, business secrets, government records, and other valuable data that is costly to lose, especially when a breach captures the media’s attention. Once public, such breaches result in tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in post‐breach losses.
The underlying reasons for these breaches are the uncontrolled handling of data and misallocation of security controls: You can’t protect data that’s unknown to you. Your greatest defense against financial and reputational post‐breach losses is to know what your sensitive data is, restrict where it’s stored, limit who has access to it, protect it, and monitor its usage as well as the creation of new sensitive data. To effectively accomplish each of these tasks, you must first find and classify your sensitive data.