The Hunt for PII: Unparalleled Visibility and Control Over the Environment

Finding personally identifiable information (PII) is a lot like finding the perfect crab cake in a lot full of food trucks. Crab metaphors aside, without knowing where your most valuable and sensitive data is, it’s impossible to protect it. This session will discuss the project roadmap and tools used by Salisbury University to successfully improve visibility and control into their environment to better identify and secure PII data. As a bonus, SU was able to leverage the same tools and methodologies for hunting PII to find hidden Log4j vulnerabilities and remediate them in real time. SU’s use case focuses on a having unparalleled visibility as a critical component for its endpoint configuration to be able to identify and remediate real-time vulnerabilities in seconds. With this solution, SU has been able to dig inside files quickly and efficiently across all servers and clients, rooting out hidden pockets of sensitive data and automatically relocating it off endpoints and servers onto authorized encrypted repositories. Due to the new solutions architecture, SU has been able to immediately respond and control assets even as employees and students were forced to transition to work remotely through the pandemic. Having real-time access to answer questions about our environment (like a Google query) is an essential tool in SU’s arsenal and helps the university meet regulatory compliance requirements, address security issues, and fulfil audit obligations.