Planning Data Security Deployment > Determining where your confidential data resides

Determining where your confidential data resides

Applies to

Data Security v7.6.x

In this topic

Overview

Corporate file servers and shared drives

In-house databases

Overview

Based on experience from numerous data-loss protection deployments, it's evident that most sensitive company information resides within:

Corporate file servers or shared drives

In-house databases

Personal laptops, workstations and removable media

Corporate file servers and shared drives

There are a few ways to determine where your confidential information is stored:

Ask

Talk to appropriate data owners in your organization and they may point you to relevant locations. This may cover a big part of the information that needs to be protected and is a good start. Your review of locations based on their revelations will undoubtedly reveal other critical data branchings and parallel storage places.

Discover

Use Websense Data Security to classify file servers, shared drives, and endpoints by running it with the relevant predefined policies enabled. This should give you bulk estimations of where data is located in your enterprise.

Combining the results gives you a good idea of the location of your confidential information.

In-house databases

As in case of file servers and shared drives, the best ways to understand which databases are critical is to ask:

Talk to people that manage in-house applications relying on internal databases (such as customer relations, orders processing, and accounting).

Talk to database administrators (DBAs) and find out what are the most accessed databases. The more a database is accessed, the more chances there are for data loss. Your IT department may also be able to elaborate on discoveries from both instances described above.

Discover:

Use Websense Data Security to classify databases by running it with the relevant predefined policies enabled. This should let you know primarily where your vital records are located.

Based on the above information, you can narrow down the most critical database servers, databases and tables to protect.

Planning Data Security Deployment > Determining where your confidential data resides