Open Access, Business Enablement, and Data Protection

“Privileged Users,” such as system administrators who manage the servers with root access, must be able to perform administrative tasks on those devices without being able to open, move, or change critical files. 

Finally, to support the organization’s culture of openness, the organization could not allow blocking. Instead, they required immediate notification of suspicious or prohibited use of data, so the incident response team could quickly respond to and investigate the activity.

Critical Success Factors 

• Global, open access to sensitive merger and acquistion data 
• Flexible data discovery and classification 
• Rapid visibility into data risks to support immediate incident response

The Solution

Fortra™’s Digital Guardian® worked with the customer to understand its information needs while meeting its security goals. Digital Guardian provided a granular solution that identified and provided appropriate data to each user, while protecting the confidential information of each deal.

Digital Guardian’s Context-based capability automatically classified and tagged all investment banking data in the file shares. This prevented incorrect manual categorization, simplified segmenting data by deal, and ensured all documents were classified. Digital Guardian’s tags, at the metadata level, allowed the company to track and prevent unauthorized reuse of material. If a document is tagged as “Confidential” and restricted to a specific group, that classification persists and is “inherited” by derivative documents. For their confidential investment models, if a user copies a section of the document, any new document with that section will have the same rights and restrictions of the original document. 

Classification also broke the previously rigid link between access rights to the file shares and specific documents. By implementing policies, members of each deal team were restricted to data related to their individual deals, based on the classification provided by Digital Guardian. Other users, even those with elevated access privileges, were prohibited by the same policies from accessing the data. The solution monitored and logged all user action, reporting prohibited activity immediately to the incident response team.