You need to protect your data. Obvious! But with data growing day by day, it is difficult to know where it is, especially when you have a range of different applications and collaboration tools, like Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket (Cloud, On-Prem, Hybrid) and Office 365, used across the business and data being shared by users. What if it is leaked? You also need to be able to track the personal and sensitive data your organisation has, so you can quickly fulfil Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs) when they come in to avoid fines.

Your consumers are also becoming savvier and demanding about protecting their data. 65% of them say they want to get a better picture of the data you are gathering on them and 84% say they might stop doing business with you, if you can't show their data is being adequately protected. Additionally, the UK government is currently discussing a new bill to change data protection regulations. How do you prepare for the changes that might bring? Then, behind the scenes, cybercriminals are ramping up their efforts, so there are potential external breaches to contend with, as well as internal threats to your data.

For small and medium businesses, keeping a track of sensitive data and protecting it is a real challenge, and you are probably looking at data loss prevention (DLP) solutions to help you manage and eliminate the manual process, ensuring you are fully covered for potential risks to your business. However, what you will probably find is a choice of expensive 'all bells and whistles' enterprise DLP solutions, versus piecemeal DLP tools that cannot cover the whole gamut of applications you have.

The good news is that there are complementary solutions to help you understand what sensitive data you have and where it is, so that you can apply the right data protection policies. Data discovery tools enable you to quickly discover sensitive data and confidential information across your business, elim-inating the need for lengthy manual data searches.

Automatically scanning your data at rest, data discovery tools help you understand your data risk profile. After understanding the data that you have, you can then classify the data and set up policies and an action plan to enforce specific actions on these different types. For example, you can determine whether the data needs to be protected or removed securely.

Ideally, data discovery tools enable you to find data wherever it resides - on-premise, in the cloud - on different endpoints, servers and network file shares, as well as in structured and unstructured data in collaborative workplace solutions, such as Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Atlassian, Alfresco and more.

You can read a more comprehensive take on data discovery by clicking here.