Protegrity has long believed in empowering organizations with the right tools to effectively safeguard data.
No two industries are alike, let alone two companies. That’s why we help each business craft its own data-protection policies and choose the corresponding technologies that best fit those individual needs, rather than force-feeding a cookie-cutter approach.
Safeguarding data is a unique undertaking for those that manage their own data. That belief is why we’re advancing the idea of freedom more than ever with the release of version 8.1 of the Protegrity Data Protection Platform. With v8.1, we’re introducing several new features that will give organizations even greater choice in how they protect data.
Choice, in fact, is one of three “C’s” Protegrity offers customers: the choice to select a data-protection method that best aligns with business use, control over who can access sensitive data, and confidence that sensitive data is indeed de-identified even if an unauthorized user accesses it.
Choice definitely underlines our new features:
- Dynamic data masking (DDM) masks data from unauthorized users, enabling organizations to have greater choice and control over the level of data protection they implement to meet the needs of the business;
- Monitoring provides you visibility over specific sensitive data elements to determine who is viewing sensitive data and how they are using it, without changing the data at rest;
Also, separate from those new data-protection features, Protegrity has redesigned how we collect and store information about what’s happening to your sensitive data. With our re-architected audit logging infrastructure, your organization can have a better understanding of just how effectively you’re keeping sensitive data secure and private.
Here’s a closer look at what’s behind v8.1:
PUT ON YOUR DYNAMIC DATA PROTECTION MASK
The Protegrity Data Protection Platform is a sophisticated, robust platform. Our tried-and-true tokenization data-protection method works in concert with centralized policy enforcement to ensure data is always secure at rest across the myriad of data warehouses, file servers, big data systems, and mainframes that underlie operational, transactional, and analytical systems and programs.
No other platform can protect data anywhere and everywhere. But not every business—at least not yet—needs that level of data protection and all that our platform has to offer. Instead, they only want to apply a more basic level of data protection. In order to meet those customers where they’re at now, we have added, in v8.1, more data protection tools to our toolbox: dynamic data masking and enhanced monitoring.
Unlike tokenization or encryption, DDM doesn’t make any changes to the data. Rather, it hides certain data from those not authorized to see it; they instead see only a “masked” outlay of characters that make no sense. Masking isn’t as involved a process as our other data-protection methods—but that’s just what some of our customers and prospective customers want. They want to start using our platform with a data-protection method that is of a lesser security posture than tokenization, but with the option to always mature their data-protection capabilities down the road to something more encompassing.
To that end, we’re also now offering enhanced monitoring to complement DDM. With v8.1, Protegrity can monitor and record how organizations handle their sensitive data so that they can see exactly who is accessing that data and who is requesting to access it.
And to support DDM, monitoring, and Gen 2 Unicode Tokenization, we have also improved the audit-logging infrastructure of our platform. We will continue to collect audit logs according to customers’ specifications, but in addition to the logs being available in Protegrity’s enterprise security administrator (ESA), we can also send them directly to an organization’s security information event management (SIEM) tools.
Taken together, all of these new features will help our customers create data-security policies that will come in handy for when they decide to strengthen their data-security posture and extend their use of the platform by tokenizing their data or combining tokenization with dynamic data masking.
CHOOSE A LANGUAGE. . .WE’LL PROTECT THE DATA
Unicode is an international standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in the world’s writing systems. With v8.1, Protegrity introduces Gen 2 Unicode Tokenization, bringing all the advantages of our industry-leading tokenization to all text that’s encoded in one- and two-byte Unicode standards. The improved capabilities deliver character-encoding and length-preserving tokenization without performance penalties, allowing organizations to easily tokenize text from all Western alphabets.
Gen 2 Unicode Tokenization enables the tokenization of languages such as French, German, Turkish, and Russian. The tokenization is made “language-aware” so that if the input is Russian, for example, the token output will be with Russian characters. Those previously unprotected Cyrillic characters now get a safe voyage on their tokenization journey.
V8.1 PROVIDES CHOICE AND CONTROL AND ENGENDERS CONFIDENCE
Organizations are creating and managing more data than ever before. IDC predicts that by 2025, 175 zettabytes (or 175 trillion gigabytes) of new data will have been created around the world. Protecting data will only become more of an imperative as the volume of data increases—and as government regulations and the demands of customers expect complete data privacy.
With dynamic data masking, enhanced audit monitoring, Gen 2 Unicode Tokenization, and audit logging—v8.1 builds upon our belief that data protection is all about choice, control, and confidence.