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What is Data Discovery and Classification?
Data Discovery and Classification is the process of identifying and classifying your data and the personal information within it, allowing you to be more secure and more compliant.
Data discovery and data classification are the two most essential components of data management.
- Data discovery is the process of identifying and locating data sources, understanding data formats, and assessing data quality.
- Data classification is the process of labeling and tagging data based on its sensitivity, value, and regulatory requirements. Data is most commonly classified as public, internal, confidential, or restricted.
70 %
of enterprises are able to classify only 50% or less of their data.
– Thales Data Threat Report
Find and protect your data with CipherTrust
CipherTrust Data Discovery and Classification (DDC) discovers and classifies data enabling organizations to become more secure and compliant. Bring agility and confidence to your data management. CipherTrust Data Discovery and Classification provides complete visibility into the location of sensitive data across your enterprise, so you can uncover and close compliance gaps.
DDC scans structured as well as unstructured data stores for named entities in different formats and global languages to help you find any type of sensitive data, in any language, anywhere across your enterprise
- Discover and Classify your Data
- Better Secure your Data
- Enhance your Compliance Posture
Why you'll love CipherTrust Data Discovery and Classification
Enhance your data security
- Easily discover and classify your data
- Central platform for data management
- Real-time data dashboards and reports
- Discovery of custom info types
Easily manage data security
- Secure sensitive data
- Understand your security risks
- Discover secrets before they become security issues
- Know what data needs what level of security
Address compliance requirements
- Uncover compliance gaps
- Reduce risk
- Discard unnecessary data
- Stay ahead of regulatory changes
Data Stores | ||
|---|---|---|
| Local storage | Local storage SharePoint On Prem Exchange Server Local Windows and Linux | Network Storages
|
| Network Storage | Windows share (CIS/SMB) | |
| Database | IBM DB2 Microsoft SQL MongoDS MySQL | Oracle DB PostgreSQL SAP HANA SQL |
| Big Data | Hadoop clusters | Teradata |
| Cloud | AWS S3 Buckets Azure Blobs and Table Google Workspace (Gmail and Gdrive) | Azure Table Office 365 (Exchange, SharePoint, & OneDrive) SalesForce |
Types of file supported | ||
|---|---|---|
| Databases | Access Dbase | SQLite MSSQL MDF & LDF |
| Images | BMP FAX GIF JPG | PDF (embedded) PNG TIF |
| Compressed | Bzip2 Gzip (all types) | TAR ZIP (all types) |
| Microsoft TXT Backup Archive | Microsoft Binary / BKF | |
| Microsoft Office | v5 6 95 97 2000 | XP 2003 onwards Office Files:Word, Excel, PowerPoint. Access, OutlooK, Other(.pub & .xps) |
| Open Source | Star Office / Open Office /Libre Office | |
| Open Standards | PDF RTF HTML | XML CSV TXT |
Types of file supported | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| APA | Australia Privacy Amendment | HIPAA | Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act |
| APPI | Act on Protection of Personal Information | KVKK | Turkish Personal Data Protection Law |
| CCPA | California Consumer Privacy Act | LGPD | General Data Protection Law (Brazil) |
| GDPR | Financial | NYDFS | New York State Department of Financial Services |
| GDPR | General Data Protection Regulation | PCI DSS | Payment Card Industry DataSecurity Standard |
| GDPR | Healthcare | SHIELD | Privacy Shield Framework |
| GDPR | National ID | UK-GDPR | General Data Protection Regulation (UK) |
| GDPR | Personal Details |
Analyst Research
Thales Named Overall Leader in Data Security Platforms
Learn why in the KuppingerCole Leadership Compass on Data Security Platforms, 2025
DATA DISCOVERY AND CLASSIFICATION FEATURES
Gain the visibility you need of sensitive data across your enterprise
Enhanced security
Without understanding where your data is, it’s hard to prevent data breaches and unauthorized access and implement security measures to protect your data. Classifying your data ensures it is managed according to compliance regulations.
Data management
Eliminate excess storage and costs by reducing redundant, obsolete, or stored data that has no business value to your organization. Create streamlined workflows that automate future processes and grant access based on user needs.
Ongoing compliance
Keeps you up to date automatically with all major global and regional compliance requirements while reducing the risk of failed audits or fines by proactively identifying compliance gaps.
Secrets discovery
When threat actors discover secrets such as tokens, API keys, passwords, or usernames, they can be used to break into IT systems. CipherTrust Data Discovery and Classification uses AI to proactively scan code for specific patterns, making developers aware of them before they become security threats. Secrets discovery proactively helps stop malicious actors before they gain unauthorized access to your data.
Comprehensive platform
Gain visibility into the location of sensitive data so you can uncover and close security and compliance gaps. DDC scans structured and unstructured data stores for named entities in different formats and global languages to help customers find sensitive data in any language anywhere across their enterprise.
Simplified installation and management
Identifying sensitive data across the enterprise is time-consuming, underscoring the need for tools that facilitate quick deployment, enabling prompt scanning. The installation of DDC has been streamlined through automated scripts, simplifying on-premises deployments for single-node and five-node configurations. The setup process for cloud installations requires only a single click, automatically integrating all components into the cloud environment.
IMPROVE YOUR DATA SECURITY
Find out how CipherTrust Data Discovery and Classification can help your business
Connect with a Thales expert for help tailoring a data security plan to your organization's needs.
RESOURCES & FAQS
Learn how to discover and protect your sensitive data
Frequently asked questions
How does CipherTrust Data Discovery and Classification work?
CipherTrust Data Discovery and Classification provides complete visibility into the location of sensitive data across your enterprise, so you can uncover and close compliance gaps.
DDC scans structured as well as unstructured data stores for named entities in different formats and global languages to help you find any type of sensitive data, in any language, anywhere across your enterprise.
Once you have identified security blind spots you can quickly remediate using one of the CipherTrust Platform’s market-leading encryption solutions.
What customer problems and use cases does DDC address?
Compliance with security and privacy regulations: Organizations need to protect Personally Identifiable Information (PII) against data leaks and improper use to comply with the requirements of privacy regulations like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and Brazilian General Data Protection Law (LGPD). CipherTrust DDC provides complete visibility into the location of sensitive data, enhancing an organization’s ability to adopt appropriate data security controls and measure to protect sensitive personal data from loss and unauthorized access.
Increase data visibility: Organizations need greater data visibility to support better decision making for risk analysis and remediation, as well as reporting and compliance. According to the 2024 Thales Data Threat Report, 70% of enterprises are able to classify only 50% or less of their data. CipherTrust DDC automatically scans your data stores across on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments to help you protect and manage your sensitive data.
Reduce exposure risk during cloud migration: Major change programs like digital transformation involve moving large amounts of sensitive data from one environment to another. Uncontrolled dispersal of data across cloud platforms increases the potential of a data breach event, as well as infringement of privacy regulations. As IT environments become more complex, it becomes more difficult to discover sensitive data and have oversight or manage access across data sources. CipherTrust DDC provides visibility into exactly what information you have stored so you can plan an effective strategy for transformation to safeguard data at each stage of the process.
Secrets discovery: Modern development trends like containerization, DevOps and automation have contributed to a massive increase in the use of secrets (credentials, certificates, keys) for authentication. Secrets can be vulnerable to cyberattacks when not securely managed. The CipherTrust Data Security Platform provides a simplified workflow to address this risk. DDC automatically discovers more than 30 different types of secrets, including AES Keys, Auth Secrets, and SSH Keys. Once exposed secrets have been discovered, security teams can take actions to remediate the risk and improve security posture using CipherTrust Secrets Management.
How does the solution help protect data and enforce compliance?
CipherTrust Data Discovery and Classification efficiently locates sensitive data across an enterprise using a streamlined workflow that automates discovery, classification and protection, eliminates security blind spots, and provides a clear view of the sensitive data and its risks.
It comes with a comprehensive set of built-in templates for rapid discovery of regulated data. As a result, organizations can more easily uncover and close their data protection gaps, prioritize their remediation efforts, and proactively respond to a growing number of data privacy and data security regulations.
How does DDC communicate securely with data stores?
CipherTrust Data Discovery and Classification communicates with the data stores through agents. The agents can be installed locally or remotely to the data stores. The agents connect to the data sources using native protocols, e.g., NFS for Unix Share, SMB for Windows Share, HDFS for Hadoop, etc.
Each protocol has its own way of protecting data. For example:
- Databases: user and password authentication with SSL/TLS.
- NFS can be secured using host access and file permissions configuration.
- SMB uses user, password and domain authentication.
- Hadoop uses a proprietary protocol.
Customer is responsible for the following:
- Using TLS or plain text
- Hardening of the servers where the agents are deployed
What are the deployment options?
The solution is deployed on-premises by installing an agent on the host, or remotely via a proxy agent.
What are the pros and cons for agent-based and agentless deployments?
Below are the recommendations for agent-based and agentless deployments. Both approaches share the following pros:
Agent-Based
- Value
- Information does not need to be transmitted over the network to be scanned
- Faster scan
- No need for credentials for scanning
- Recommendation
- Scanning data stores that allow an Agent to be installed locally. E.g. local storage and local memory on server or workstation with installed Agents
Agentless
- Value
- Faster deployment, as Agents do not have to be installed directly on Target hosts
- Can scan multiple targets
- It can scan any type of targets
- It doesn’t consume resources on the target host
- Recommendation
- Scanning data stores that can only be accessed remotely. E.g. database systems, email servers, cloud storages and network storage locations
How does DDC compare with Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions?
DLP solutions focus on preventing sensitive data from leaving the organization’s perimeter. CipherTrust Data Discovery and Classification focuses on data privacy and protection – identifying sensitive data, and getting a clear understanding of data and its risk.
This enables organizations to take appropriate steps to protect their data and comply with data privacy and data security regulations.