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Privacera Documentation

Table of Contents

Get started with Discovery

Privacera Discovery helps reveal information about your data and usage.

Privacera Discovery crawls computing assets such as databases or files, which are called data sources. It scans the data sources to identify sensitive information like credit card numbers, Social Security Numbers, and other personal, restricted, or confidential information.

Privacera Discovery classifies or labels this information to create a comprehensive catalog of your sensitive data. You can review these classifications to accept or reject them or refine the scanning via rules, dictionaries, models, and patterns.

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The scans use a variety of techniques you can manipulate to identify and classify sensitive information:

  • Pattern matching with regular expressions.

  • Dictionaries to look up data from a whitelist or blacklist.

  • Sophisticated heuristics that look at both the data content and the context in which the data is located, such as the table or column name.

By reviewing and updating the classifications generated by the scanners, you can further implement policies to protect sensitive data in conformance with your enterprise's requirements. For example, you might want a policy that allows non-privileged users to see only the masked or transformed versions of certain sensitive fields such as SSNs or credit card numbers.

By grouping data sources into administrative data zones, maintenance and control of the assets in these zones can be delegated to the owners of the data in your enterprise's organizational groups.

Privacera Discovery has a variety of reports to aggregate, summarize, drill down into the classification results across the entire collection of data assets.

Planning for Privacera Discovery

This is a general approach to setting up Privacera Discovery.

Install and Enable Privacera Discovery

Use the Privacera Manager to install and enable Privacera Discovery.

See the following information: