Every sector holds a different mix of sensitive data, in different systems, under different pressure. Discovery and classification adapt to the data patterns your industry actually works with.
A bank knows which core systems hold account and payment data. What is harder to produce is a current list of every file outside those systems carrying the same values: the extract someone pulled for a reconciliation, the spreadsheet a branch built to track exceptions, the attachment in a three-year-old mailbox. Those copies are where the exposure usually sits.
Discovery locates account and payment values wherever they were saved, and reports who can currently open each file.
One category scheme applied by the platform rather than by each department reaching its own conclusion.
Rules that treat an internal transfer and an external upload differently, rather than blocking both or neither.
Each recorded action keeps the file, the person, the destination and the rule version that applied at that time.
Clinical work depends on sharing. Records pass between departments, referrals go out by email, images are exported for a second opinion. Controls tight enough to stop a mistaken send often stop legitimate correspondence too, so they end up switched off — and meanwhile exports accumulate in shared folders long after the case that needed them closed.
An internal referral and an unfamiliar external address are treated differently, so clinical sharing keeps working.
Scheduled discovery keeps finding the copies that were made for one purpose and then simply stayed.
When a recipient looks wrong for the label, the sender is asked to confirm instead of being silently blocked.
Every send, export and copy of labelled material is recorded with its destination and the rule that applied.
Universities and school groups run unusually decentralised estates. Departments choose their own tools, research groups keep their own stores, and administrative systems are inherited through mergers and restructures. Sensitive records about students and staff end up spread across all of it, with no single owner able to say what is held where.
Discovery runs across departmental shares in place and returns one inventory rather than a set of departmental answers.
Permission reporting shows where folders became readable far more widely than anyone intended.
Categories can be scoped to a group, so a research store is governed differently from an administrative one.
A search across the inventory replaces a manual round of enquiries to every department.
Agencies accumulate case files, correspondence and departmental archives over long periods. Systems change hands as functions are merged and split, and the people who knew what a given share contained have usually moved on. The result is a large amount of personal information held in places nobody has a current map of.
Scanning does not require moving records out of the systems that hold them.
A query across the inventory replaces a multi-week manual search with uncertain coverage.
Permission reporting shows current access rather than what the original design intended.
Nominated directories are baselined, and change against that baseline is reported as it happens.
Retail and hospitality groups operate across many sites with high staff turnover and a long tail of local spreadsheets. Customer and booking information gets exported for a promotion, a reconciliation or a site report, and those exports rarely get cleaned up. The central systems are usually well governed; the copies around them are not.
Discovery finds customer and booking data saved outside the central systems, site by site.
Permission reporting surfaces access that was never withdrawn when someone moved on.
Movement rules apply on site machines whether or not they are connected at the time.
External destinations can be governed separately from internal ones, per label.
Two organisations in the same industry rarely have the same data problem. Tell us how yours is actually arranged and we will work from that.
