Guardum
Helping Companies Discover, Redact and Protect Sensitive Data

Since GDPR came into force, DSARs have been increasingly used by employees who are aware of their rights in the workplace. That said, companies are experiencing increased costs associated with hiring the workforce and implementing technological solutions needed to respond and process DSARs. In addition, an organisation’s inability to efficiently handle its critical data assets encumbers responses to DSARs and poses a significant problem to enterprise security. Consequently, it is imperative that companies need to process a DSAR request with speed, data accuracy and regulatory compliance.

This is where a company from London, Guardum, has carved a niche for itself.

The company enables businesses to fully meet the DSAR challenge of responding within the tight 30-day deadline by efficiently locating and protecting unstructured data across the enterprise for proper governance, data security, and compliance cost-effectively. “We work closely with our client’s to magnify the capabilities of their existing staff by ensuring all requests are completed to a high degree of accuracy and quality to meet the legal requirements of GDPR,” says Darren Wray, CTO and Co-Founder of Guardum.

Each DSAR request involves a lengthy process requiring locating, extracting and authenticating sensitive information across disparate systems, monitoring third parties’ data protection practices, and addressing data minimisation. During the lockdown, firms experienced an increase in the number of employee access requests for DSARs involving video conferencing, making it more complex and challenging than ever to meet all the requirements under GDPR. In addition, there has been a considerable increase in malicious DSAR requests from disgruntled former employees or maliciously motivated insider threat requests, ranging from fraudulent intent to obtain information or targeting a specific employee.

Guardum implements a simple three-step process to help clients define relevant personally identifiable information, apply anonymisation and intelligent redaction techniques, whilst continuing to scan and protect the data environment. The company’s solutions rapidly locate sensitive information held specifically in unstructured formats, whether on-premises or in the cloud. Once the data has been located, it is protected through anonymisation with encryption and redaction of personally identifiable information, which is critical in compliance with global data regulations, including the GDPR and CCPA. Furthermore, Guardum enables clients to gain complete control over their information, beyond the digital world to hard copies of data, which can be scanned with the help of approved partners and subsequently classified using the company’s proprietary tools.

What differentiates Guardum from the rest of the competition is its unique APIs that allow users to implement its proprietary tools within their local network environment. In addition, the company uses a client-centric approach and emphasises end-user feedback as a cornerstone of providing excellent customer service to distinguish itself. To further illustrate the company’s efficacy, Wray cites a case study where the client was processing an average of 10,000 pages per DSAR. Although the client had developed a workflow process to deal with DSARs that was effective, it was very resource and time-intensive to manually review and redact data to comply properly with the GDPR. The client sought ways to increase efficiency while at the same time lowering the cost per DSAR. Using Guardum’s proprietary tools has significantly improved the processing times by up to 95 per cent, completing 100 hours of work in merely 4 hours. Thanks to Guardum, the client could process each request more quickly and achieve quality checking in a fraction of the time it usually took using a combination of manual and legacy tools.

In the three years since the GDPR came into effect, maintaining and establishing compliance has become a key challenge for organisations worldwide that hold data on EU citizens. Additionally, the onset of the COVID-19 crisis has further forced companies to accelerate digital transformation, deploy remote work and digital access to services across every domain. As more countries plan to introduce modern privacy laws in the same vein as the GDPR, companies worldwide have reached a threshold where the European baseline for handling personal information is now the de facto global standard. Guradum was founded in 2016 for large European enterprises by veterans in the data privacy and governance field to use GDPR compliant pattern matching techniques to find and protect personal data. Its co-founder, Darren Wray, is a former Data Protection Officer and has been involved in implementing business and IT processes that handle personal data since 1984. Wray has published several best-selling books on IT and data protection and regularly speaks at events about data protection, information security, cyber security, and IT leadership. “Guardum’s European back-ground and in-depth expertise in GDPR, ideally positions it to help companies around the globe with their data privacy and protection endeavors,” adds Wray. The company is partly owned by Donnelley Financial Solutions, an American regulatory governance and compliance firm leader. Soon, Guardum seeks to enhance its products and capabilities to match its ongoing regional expansion while supporting its existing customers.