Sensitive data in the cloud gets new automated remediation tool from BigID

Data intelligence company BigID announced this week at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas that it has rolled out new features for its privacy and data protection platform, allowing users to programmatically restrict access to sensitive cloud-based information when it’s under threat.

BigID’s core product, its Data Intelligence platform, already boasts numerous capabilities focused on the privacy, organization and discovery of a company’s data. The new features announced this week build on that framework, allowing IT staff to automatically lock down access to sensitive information tagged as having open or overprivileged access in the big three public cloud platforms.

Where BigID’s platform previously had the ability to simply identify high-risk areas in an organization’s data—flagging them to the user as potentially vulnerable—the new features add in automatic remediation.

Part of the appeal, according to BigID, is that the whole system is structured like an application, which means that organizations don’t need a lot of in-house expertise in order to get it working. The new capabilities are managed from within the company’s Data Intelligence platform, allowing IT staff to take action quickly when problems are detected.

“Step one [in data protection] is simply to know your data,” said BigID chief marketing officer Sarah Hospelhorn. “We’ve got AI automation to find, classify and add context around it, then can layer on additional action to streamline data minimization, retention, regulatory compliance, and reduce (and remediate) risk.”

The system addresses what BigID said is a highly salient issue for the vast majority of businesses today, citing an in-house study performed in partnership with Gartner that reports that less than 10% of organizations were confident in their capacity to identify and tag all of the high-risk data stored on either their in-house or cloud-based systems.

The new access management features are currently available in Google Drive, but the company said that availability for AWS S3 and Microsoft 365 are expected to follow “shortly.” BigID didn’t release detailed pricing information, but said that pricing is based on the number of data sources that the system has to scan—there’s a foundational price that scales with how large the storage environment is, with a further 20% on top for the “access intelligence” capabilities.