Issue 1 for PCI Data – Where is the credit card data?
Following up on my last post, I will cover the first key data issue and lessons around PCI.
Issue 1: Where is the credit card data? Can we find data in our databases and fileservers? Scalability and manageability problems was disappointing by early experience with crawlers.
For “data discovery” which is the good old problem. Many vendors will try to sell complicated crawlers and data classification engines that will scour servers, index the data and build classification etc. Most crawlers don’t work well in such environments. Also most crawlers need authentication information to login to each server and managing this across a large data center is difficulte. My recommendation is the following: Start with imperfect lightweight discovery that gets smarter over time. It’s better to get started rather than wait for a perfect heavyweight discovery. I suggest starting with an “active discovery” that watches any access to your servers and builds a data discovery map based on this access. Once you have an idea of a good working set of critical servers to start with; you can always add a crawler-based discovery more selectively to such servers. The combination of “breadth-first” active discovery and “depth-next” crawler discovery is a power combination that reduces overhead, simultaneously keeps the discovery up-to-date.
One good approach for active discovery is provided by data auditing without requiring crawling, without requiring agents, and without requiring logging to be turned on, on the servers. Data Auditing was used by enterprises are usually pleasantly surprised with the ease of use. It can turn an endless discovery project into a project lasting few days. Active discovery can be turned on and off. It can also be linked to policies.
Recommendation: Lightweight discovery is the best. Progress in steps – active discovery combined with selective deep crawling will give you the momentum to solve the messy data problem in stages.
