Compliance

The Top 10 Sensitive Data Discovery Software

Explore the top sensitive data discovery software with features like pattern recognition, data classification, and compliance reporting.

The Top 10 Sensitive Data Discovery Software Include:
  • 1. Mage Sensitive Data Discovery
  • 2. ManageEngine DataSecurity Plus
  • 3. Netwrix StealthAUDIT
  • 4. Nightfall AI
  • 5. OneTrust Data Discovery & Classification
  • 6. Oracle Data Safe
  • 7. Osano Subject Rights Management
  • 8. Rubrik Sensitive Data Monitoring
  • 9. Spirion
  • 10. Varonis

Sensitive Data Discovery (SDD) software helps organizations to identify, classify, and manage sensitive information across their data landscape. Data is one of an organization’s most valuable assets. Ensuring that data is appropriately safeguarded is critical to maintaining trust with customers and complying with increasingly stringent regulatory requirements. Implementing a sensitive data discovery solution can help automate this process, thereby reducing risks associated with human error. It also increases the efficiency and effectiveness of data management efforts.

Sensitive data discovery solutions utilize advanced algorithms, machine learning, and pattern recognition to identify sensitive information such as personally identifiable information (PII), credit card numbers, social security numbers, and other confidential data. Once this information has been identified, it can be secured and monitored. 

With the exponential growth in the volume and complexity of data, it is essential for organizations to have tools that can automatically discover and classify sensitive information. These tools help in maintaining data security, enabling audit and compliance programs, and adhering to data privacy regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA.

When evaluating sensitive data discovery solutions, there are a range of features to consider, these include ease of deployment, scalability, robustness of classification algorithms, and compatibility with existing systems. In this guide, we will list the top sensitive data discovery software solutions based on their features, integration capabilities, ease of use, and customer feedback.

Mage Logo

Mage Sensitive Data Discovery is a comprehensive, centrally managed platform that allows you to apply consistent data discovery and classification configurations across environments and repositories (both on-premise and cloud-hosted). Mage includes pre-configured discovery configurations for Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data elements (as defined by common data privacy regulations, such as GDPR, CCPA, PDPA, PCI-DSS, and HIPAA). These configurations can be customized to meet specific discovery requirements and satisfy a range of use cases.

The solution utilizes multiple discovery methods (with configurable weighting and scoring) to ensure accuracy, whilst minimizing false positives. Mage Data Discovery supports structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data formats, making it compatible with a wide range of data repository platforms. The discovery process is optimized to reduce time and resource consumption. This is achieved through using incremental data scans and automated detection of data records.

Mage delivers data discovery results through intuitive, data-rich dashboards for easy analysis and insights. The platform also integrates seamlessly with Mage’s Test Data Management, Static and Dynamic Data Masking features to provide comprehensive data protection and privacy compliance. The scalable, distributed nature of Mage allows for simultaneous data discovery across various repositories and files, making it a highly efficient and effective solution for sensitive data discovery.

Mage Logo
ManageEngine logo

DataSecurity Plus is a comprehensive solution designed to address multiple aspects of file security and data protection. This is achieved through file server auditing, file analysis, data risk assessment, data leak prevention, and cloud protection. The software effectively audits and reports on all file accesses and modifications. This provides real-time alerts for high-risk file activities.

In addition, DataSecurity Plus allows users to analyze disk space usage, manage junk data, identify at-risk data, and analyze file permissions. It also helps in discovering and classifying sensitive personal data, such as PII or ePHI, to ensure compliance with relevant regulations. Data leak prevention features detect and prevent sensitive data leaks via various endpoints such as USB devices, emails, web applications, and printers.

Cloud protection capabilities include tracking web traffic, identifying shadow web app usage, and enforcing policies to block inappropriate or malicious web content. DataSecurity Plus offers a comprehensive solution for data security and risk management, helping organizations protect their valuable information assets.

ManageEngine logo

Netwrix StealthAUDIT is an extensible platform that streamlines data management and security for critical data repositories, systems, and applications. By automating data collection and analysis, it helps businesses reduce their attack surface, ensure regulatory compliance, and remediate threats effectively.

The platform offers an agentless architecture, making data collection quick and lightweight. It covers both on-premises and cloud-based platforms, allowing businesses to have complete visibility over sensitive and regulated data. With its proactive security features, Netwrix StealthAUDIT helps identify potential risks such as excessive user permissions, disabled accounts, and externally shared files.

Netwrix StealthAUDIT can also help minimize user access privileges and remediate threats by removing unnecessary permissions and accounts automatically. Businesses can delegate access management tasks to data owners, who can then review and adjust permissions as needed. Additionally, the platform helps companies meet regulatory requirements for data subject access requests and provides easy-to-digest reports for auditors.

The platform also offers automation and integration with various systems, reducing the workload on IT teams and improving overall efficiency. Netwrix StealthAUDIT connects with a range of data sources and can be extended through REST APIs, maximizing the value of your existing technology investments.

Nightfall AI Logo

Nightfall is an AI-native data leak prevention (DLP) platform that focuses on discovering, classifying, and protecting sensitive and personally identifiable data across a company’s SaaS and GenAI stack. The platform aims to integrate easily and quickly into a business’s system, offering continuous data monitoring and automated remediation to maintain compliance with industry-leading standards such as SOC 2 and HIPAA.

Nightfall’s platform provides high accuracy in detecting sensitive data with its AI-powered technology, reducing false positives while proactively protecting company and customer data in real-time. It includes in-built analytics to discover and quantify data exposure risks, as well as supporting 100+ file types and offering historical scans to review stored data.

It is a comprehensive, yet simple, data protection solution. Nightfall for SaaS seamlessly integrates with SaaS apps to locate and rectify data exposure risks. It features agentless, painless DLP, allowing IT managers to identify and manage sensitive data (such as PCI, PII, and PHI) from a single dashboard without the need for agent installation. Additionally, Nightfall offers an AI-powered Chrome extension for protecting and redacting sensitive information from ChatGPT prompts. This contributes to reducing risk and building trust among businesses and customers.

Nightfall AI Logo
OneTrust Logo

OneTrust’s Data Discovery & Classification solution offers businesses a comprehensive way to gain visibility and control over their sensitive data throughout its lifecycle. With the help of AI, the solution discovers and classifies data across various sources (including structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data), enabling responsible use throughout the data lifecycle. This scalable solution is designed to meet the demands of the largest enterprise datasets effectively.

The Data Discovery & Classification engine scans data at field- and file-level depth to increase visibility and improve classification accuracy. It also offers coverage for virtually any data environment through pre-built connectors into popular data sources, such as Snowflake, Salesforce, SAP, Box, AWS S3, Google Drive, Microsoft SQL, and OneDrive. In addition to these features, the platform integrates with privacy management tools and existing ticketing systems (like ServiceNow or Zendesk) for automating consumer rights requests.

OneTrust’s solution helps businesses to enforce security controls, build real-time data visualization maps, and gain a better understanding of privacy requirements. The platform also allows for easy integration with third-party catalogs and data management tools. Privacy and security are baked into the design of OneTrust’s Data Discovery & Classification solution. It provides an extensible ecosystem with low cost of ownership and high return on investment, making the data discovery journey easy, effective, and efficient for businesses of all sizes.

OneTrust Logo
Oracle Logo

Oracle Data Safe is a security platform that helps organizations manage their database security and compliance requirements for both on-premises and in cloud datasets. With its unified console, Data Safe enables users to understand data sensitivity, evaluate risks, redact sensitive data, implement and monitor security controls, assess user security, and monitor user activity. The platform identifies, categorizes, and prioritizes risks, while delivering comprehensive assessment reports on security parameters, controls, and user roles and privileges.

By focusing on minimizing user risk through managing privileges and authentications, Data Safe can detect risky behavior and overprivileged users. It also allows for the collection of audit data from databases, the management of audit and alert policies, and the analysis of database activity using out-of-box or custom audit reports. Oracle Data Safe features a library of over 150 predefined sensitive data types that can be extended to meet an organization’s requirements and includes masking formats for data protection. The platform offers an interactive dashboard that allows users to quickly understand database security posture, alerts, and data management status.

Oracle Logo
Osano Logo

Osano Subject Rights Management is designed to automatically find, classify, and evaluate personal data, streamlining the process of handling data subject access requests (DSARs). The platform eliminates the need for manual searches, freeing up resources for strategic and more intensive activities. Upon receiving a DSAR, Osano initiates a search, performing the requested operation and summarizing the outcome. This allows for efficient processing of DSARs at the click of a button. The platform utilizes AI-driven categorization to identify over 70 predefined data types quickly.

Osano offers a large (and growing) library of integrations, making it easy to configure new data stores for searchability. The platform supports commonly used SaaS applications, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, and Square. This allows Osano to quickly connect and scan for data fields, as well as search across various applications.

Additionally, Osano’s Subject Rights Management integrates its data discovery feature seamlessly, providing a unified and integrated user experience. The platform also offers automated data store identification to help users discover the data stores that are most likely to contain relevant information based on the request type.

Osano Logo
Rubrik Logo

Sensitive Data Monitoring is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application designed to help organizations tackle the challenging task of managing sensitive data in the cloud. The sheer amount of data that organizations interact with and have to manage makes it difficult to know where sensitive data resides. Rubrik’s solution discovers, classifies, and reports on this data, without impacting production. By leveraging existing Rubrik deployments, users can set up the application within minutes, requiring no additional infrastructure.

The application assists in reducing sensitive data exposure and managing exfiltration risks by providing visibility into the types of sensitive data and their locations. It scans backup snapshots, locates sensitive data in files and applications, and helps maintain compliance with regulations. Users can automate policy enforcement by selecting the types of personally identifiable information (PII) and other sensitive data they wish to monitor. This allows Rubrik’s analyzers to assess data exposure and facilitate compliance documentation.

Sensitive Data Monitoring allows for the enforcement of policies using pre-defined templates and custom policies to identify and classify data without impacting workflow or productivity. Users can receive alerts regarding potential policy violations and periodic reports that can help maintain compliance with GDPR, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and GLBA regulations. The application features an intuitive user interface with policy-driven automation for instant insights. It is natively integrated into existing Rubrik platforms, requiring no additional infrastructure, installation, agents, or learning curve.

Rubrik Logo
Spirion Logo

Spirion Sensitive Data Platform (SDP) is a privacy solution that assists organizations in discovering, classifying, and remediating sensitive data with 98% accuracy. With 15 years of industry-leading experience, Spirion SDP scans a wide range of locations, such as file types, email servers, cloud repositories, and databases. It ensures the detection and management of sensitive data behind your organization’s firewall.

Spirion SDP offers unmatched accuracy and actionable insights by taking context clues into account, resulting in false-positive and false-negative rates of less than 2%. Automated workflows provide simple and extensible control over complex data discovery, classification, and remediation processes. Spirion SDP also enables organizations to comply with personal data requests by associating data with identity, increasing response speeds, eliminating human error, and minimizing risk.

The platform features a modern, scalable architecture, with a cloud-hosted console for configuration and management. Spirion’s user interface includes intuitive configuration tools and playbooks, making it easy to visualize complex sensitive data workflows. The platform also utilizes Microsoft’s Power BI engine for advanced reporting and dashboard visualizations, offering system-level overviews and in-depth analysis of sensitive data scan results.

Spirion Logo
Varonis Logo

Varonis is a data security platform that offers an automated file classification system, aimed at reducing data exposure and alerting on suspicious access behavior. With Varonis, organizations can visualize their data risk across cloud and on-premises storage, prioritizing risk and ensuring compliance with privacy laws. This is achieved through a hierarchical view of sensitive and overexposed files.

The platform provides classification automation, allowing users to automatically label, remediate, search, quarantine, and dispose of sensitive data. With a vast library of over 400 policies, Varonis delivers precise classification results across petabytes of unstructured data while adapting to changes in privacy laws and regulations. The platform delivers distributed and multi-threaded scanning that ensures speed and efficiency across various file types.

Varonis offers a multitude of pre-defined reports and DSAR (Data Subject Access Request) automation, making data processing and compliance management easier for organizations. It also includes features such as attack surface reduction and secrets discovery; this helps in preventing unauthorized access to sensitive information and detecting improperly stored credentials. Overall, Varonis offers a versatile solution to help organizations manage their data security and compliance needs.

Varonis Logo
The Top 10 Sensitive Data Discovery Software