The start of good data management
Identifying and locating sensitive personal data within your company is essential for complying with regulations like GDPR, maintaining customer trust, and improving data management. Without a clear overview of where data is stored, you cannot protect it against breaches or attacks, which can have serious consequences. It’s all about ensuring security and responsible data handling.
This blog will guide you on how to locate sensitive data within your organisation.
Why you should locate your sensitive data
It’s essential for businesses to identify and locate files containing sensitive information – and here’s why:
- Compliance: Regulations like GDPR in the EU require businesses to protect personal data. Without a clear overview, you risk breaking the rules, which can lead to fines and legal consequences.
- Customer Trust: Leaks of sensitive information can damage your reputation and erode customer confidence. If you don’t know where your data is, you can’t effectively protect it from breaches or losses.
- Improved Data Management: Identifying and organizing sensitive data helps you keep track of what information you have, where it’s stored, and who has access. It’s also crucial for responding quickly to data breaches or cyberattacks.
Finding and securing sensitive data isn’t just a good practice – it’s a necessity for ensuring responsible and secure data management.
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How to find your sensitive personal data manually
When locating your files, emails, and images containing personal information, start by selecting your method for identifying sensitive personal data. It’s crucial to choose the right method to ensure you identify every ID number, credit card number, medical condition, political opinion, etc., that has made its way into your data systems. And the cleanup must still be completed within a realistic timeframe.
There are three main methods for locating your sensitive personal data:
- Hire Consultants: Engaging a data-search consultant or agency to locate your sensitive files is an option, but it comes at a high cost.
- Use a Smart Tool: A smart Data Discovery tool that automatically identifies sensitive personal data within your systems is an easy and cost-effective way to clean up files containing sensitive information.
- Do-It-Yourself: Assign one or more employees from your company to locate the files. This option can be expensive due to its time-consuming nature and carries a high risk of human error. The process may also expose your data to risks if not performed correctly. If you choose the DIY approach, it adds two additional steps:
1. Create a list of your data systems
Where do you store the data you collect? Here are some types of systems that should be checked for sensitive data:
- Local drives
- Network drives
- Cloud storage
- Email clients
- Online services and platforms
Most companies don’t rely on just one type of cloud storage, and many employees don’t always stick to using their work computers or email. As a result, the list of data systems you need to check for sensitive information can quickly become very extensive.
2. Identify what to look for
Before starting your search for personal data, it’s essential to define which sensitive information you are looking for. The range of GDPR-defined terms is almost limitless – and the list keeps evolving. This is often where companies hit a wall when trying to manually clean up their data.
Start your privacy cleanup with the big picture
A GDPR Risk report gives you a complete overview of the privacy risk in your company. The report is based on a scan with DataMapper.
A smarter way to find your sensitive data
Instead of spending hours each month finding your data, which contains personal data, you can solve the task much faster and more precise with a digital tool. In Safe Online, we have developed DataMapper, which is a browser-based data discovery tool that uses artificial intelligence to find files, emails and images that contain personal data across the company’s data systems.
Sebastian Allerelli
Founder & COO at Safe Online
Governance, Risk & Compliance Specialist
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