Data classification is a process that helps you identify what types of data you have and how you’re using it—including who needs to access it and how long you need to retain it. It’s a critical step in any business’s data governance plan, or strategy for managing and securing data and making it available across the organization. You can’t properly protect your data if you don’t know what or where it is.
Data classification often entails analyzing all of the data in your organization and putting it into predefined categories of sensitivity, such as Public, Internal-only, Confidential, and Restricted. Once all data is put into categories, you can determine the varying levels of security each category needs.
Data classification helps you strengthen risk management strategies and compliance efforts. By prioritizing levels of security, you can save IT time spent managing unnecessary controls for data that doesn’t need the highest protection. Data classification also helps you keep the right information confidential and easy to access, while maintaining the integrity of all data.
Protect, manage, archive, and gain strategic insight from your data. Leverage AI and ML, while driving employee empowerment and efficiency to support rapid digital change. Our solutions bring you artificial intelligence with actionable insight, and productive, empowered people no matter where they work.
Structured data is when data is in a standardized format, has a well-defined structure, complies to a data model, follows a persistent order, and is easily accessed by humans and programs. This data type is generally stored in a database.
While structured data only accounts for around 20 percent of data world-wide, it is the current foundation of big data. This is because it is so easy to access, use, and the outcomes of using it are far more accurate.
Why Does a Business Need Structured Data?
The biggest source of information a business has about its customers, processes, and staff is data. This data could take on many forms—feedback from customers, Tweets, financial information, stock flow, almost anything. However, a large proportion of data is completely non-quantifiable. You cannot measure feelings, reasons for behavior, or a video clip. So, structured data is required because you can draw inferences and information from it more easily than unstructured data.
If a business is planning on growing or moving into a new product segment, then structured data is required. This data is easily used in machine learning and artificial intelligence, and it results in accurate predictions about what will yield the biggest increase in business size, or which new product will sell best.
Structured data is also useful to staff: customer details, sales information, stock levels, day-to-day information that needs to be accessible, easy to manage, and provides relevant information.
Data is a commodity in this digital age. As an individual, you are sharing data about yourself and your browsing habits every time you visit a website. You provide your name and your email address in return for resources that can help you to improve yourself and the way you work. You accept cookies, you share posts on social media, and you think little of it because that is simply the way things are. As businesses, we use this information gathered from website visitors, prospects and clients to guide our decision making processes – to decide what product or enhancements we should launch next, to nurture prospects and ensure that they become customers, and to understand our markets and better target our solutions towards them.
But in the wrong hands, personally identifiable information can be incredibly dangerous.
Personal Identifiable Information (PII) is defined as:
Any information that can be used to find out who a person is. This information is sensitive and could be used for bad things like identity theft, so it is important to keep it from being accessed, used, or shared by people who shouldn’t be able to.
Let’s start with the basics. We talk about personal data all the time, but we rarely discuss personally identifiable information. Because the terms are similar, they are easily confused, or bundled together. But in reality, Personally Identifiable Information, or PII, is a specific type of personal data.
All PII is personal data, but not all personal data is personally identifiable.
When we are looking at a PII definition, we are talking about the kind of information that can be associated with a specific individual. We’re not talking about browsing history or demographics – these kinds of information may count as personal data, but cannot be used to identify who your customers are. Rather, we are talking about specific information directly related to a customer as a person – customers’ name, ID number, financial details and more.
If you’re based in South Africa or in the UK, you are likely to hear the term personally identifiable information pretty rarely, but in the US are far more likely to have come across it. PII is referred to often in legislation around the Unites States, while South Africa’s POPI Act and the EU’s GDPR are all about protecting personal data rather than PII specifically.
When it comes to unstructured data in an organization, sensitive data is the most important type of data to identify. Sensitive data falls into several classifications, but broadly refers to data that must be protected from unauthorized access to prevent harm to businesses and individuals alike. These classifications include personal information, private information, health information, and high-risk data, among others.
Unstructured data is data that doesn’t have a fixed form or structure. Images, videos, audio files, text files, social media data, geospatial data, data from IoT devices, and surveillance data are examples of unstructured data. About 80%-90% of data is unstructured. Businesses process and analyze unstructured data for different purposes, like improving operations and increasing revenue.
Unstructured data analysis is complex and requires specialized techniques, unlike structured data, which is straightforward to store and analyze.
Here is a quick glance at all of the unstructured data analysis techniques:
We understand the importance of being able to continue to use your software and access your data, even in the event of system failures, data corruption or site disasters. We provide disaster recovery solutions that include data backup as well as email and file archiving.
Your data is your most valuable asset. We implement every possible safeguard to ensure continued access to your data.The following describes the backup & archiving policy that we have in place for your solutions.
Backup Frequency
For SQL databases, we perform weekly full backups, daily differential backups and transaction log backups every 4 hours. The production servers receive full system image backups every two weeks. All backups are stored locally a backup server in the data center. Data is kept on these servers for at least 7 days for databases and 1 month for system images. This facilitates a quick restore should your production databases become corrupt or require restoring for another reason.
Off-site Storage
New backups (both database and system-level) are encrypted, compressed and archived daily to a DR data center for long-term, off-site retention. In the case of Azure deployments, encrypted archives are stored as BLOB storage in an Azure storage account in a distant region (i.e South Africa North [Johannesburg] and South Africa West [Cape Town]).
Disaster Recovery Options
Project Hosts provides options to guard against a disaster that would destroy a primary data center or otherwise take it offline.
The security of endpoints is extremely important to businesses because they both serve as necessary workplace tools — think laptops, workstations, and tablets — and they can create vulnerabilities if they’re not properly managed.
What endpoint backup protects?
Endpoint backup solutions protect against a variety of potential data loss scenarios, including:
Backup for Cloud Workloads provides backup protection for the modern IT environment. It ensures disaster recovery and fast ransomware restore for Microsoft 365, containers, hypervisors, and cloud platforms.
Online application data backup protection for the full Microsoft 365 suite, including Exchange Online, SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, and Teams.
Protect files, calendar, contacts, Teams chats, document libraries, and sites.
Be ready in case of emergencies with backup and restore capabilities for Microsoft 365.
Hypervisor Protection – Virtual machine backup and restore for multiple hypervisors. Flexibility and protection over the widest range of hypervisors with Data Protector for Cloud Workloads.
Backup for Cloud Workloads features best in class backup tools for open virtual machines, containers and cloud. It is able to backup virtual machines (VMs) running on variety of platforms: Citrix Hypervisor, Red Hat Virtualization (RHV), oVirt, KVM, Proxmox, Nutanix AHV, Kubernetes as well as Openshift, OpenStack and AWS EC2.
Cloud Workload Protection – Increased use of the cloud requires increased backup protection, and letting you use whichever cloud solutions best meet your needs.
Effective ransomware strategies must build upon zero trust principles to protect your workloads, provide early warning alerts of threatening activity, and provide quick and flexible recovery options. Introducing the Zero Loss Strategy.
A Zero Loss Strategy helps you better plan, manage, monitor, and reduce the impact of ransomware and cyberattacks. It is built on zero trust principles and implemented through our multilayered security framework for consistent and automated ransomware protection and recovery processes.
Take action before your business suffers a significant impact to avoid costly downtime. Lexicon uniquely monitors threats before bad actors impact your environment. With Lexicon, protect and monitor active files and backup copies and surface threats before data exfiltration, gaining early warning into ransomware attacks. Reduce downtime if an attack occurs and recover data and resume operations quickly.