Exterro, a provider of Legal Governance, Risk and Compliance (Legal GRC) software specifically designed for in-house legal, privacy, and IT teams at Global 2000 and Am Law 200 organizations, has introduced Exterro Smart Data Inventory, a new solution designed to help organizations build, monitor and maintain a defensible privacy program based on a single intelligent and dynamic data inventory across record types, assets, 3rd parties and processing activities.
In order to establish an effective data privacy and governance program, organizations must be able to quickly attain a real-time picture of the data that exists within their internal environment as well as cross border data transfers. Given the sheer volume of data, many organizations struggle to maintain an accurate and up-to-date inventory which is required to comply with a complex global regulatory environment. Exterro Smart Data Inventory speeds the time to compliance by reducing the time to record processing activities, eliminating redundant questions, automatically detecting high risk processing by regulation, and integrating data discovery technology.
“A company’s ability to meet their compliance obligations is directly impacted by their ability to understand what information they have, where it lives, how it’s being processed and how long they keep it – whether that’s CPRA, GDPR, PIPL, or any other privacy regulation. Without an intelligent and automated approach to building a comprehensive data inventory, this makes an already difficult and time consuming process all the more challenging,” said Ray Pathak, VP of Privacy at Exterro. “The Exterro Smart Data Inventory capability is the industry’s first truly integrated solution to seamlessly bring together deep privacy intelligence, process orchestration, advanced artificial intelligence (AI), and data governance best practices in a single platform to eliminate many of the headaches that come with having to manually build and maintain a data inventory.”
Conducting a comprehensive data inventory is considered to be the first and most important step in building a defensible privacy and data governance program. It’s also the most time consuming and costly stage that when done manually, can take months to complete, is rendered inaccurate or already out of date by the time it is completed, and can cost several hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some of the key benefits that Exterro Smart Data Inventory provides to customers include:
- Accelerated Compliance: Natively integrated with Exterro Data Discovery, Exterro Smart Data Inventory speeds time to compliance with global privacy regulations. Compliance is also accelerated by a fully configurable rules engine, enabling users to create automated policy enforcement triggers based on organizational privacy, security or other internal policies.
- Increased Productivity & Efficiency: Embedded artificial intelligence technology powers productivity gains across departments and stakeholders by personalizing suggestions based on role and response history as well as offering proactive recommendations based on specific regulatory requirements. The Smart Data Inventory also boosts team productivity via automated, AI-driven discovery of personally sensitive data and related data subjects. Exterro Smart Data Inventory also eliminates redundant questions commonly asked in PIA/DPIAs via a powerful rules engine that automatically detects if any sensitive PII and/or vulnerable Data Subjects are part of the processing activity (i.e., business process) which dramatically reduces the time organizations spend to collect data inventory information from their business users.
- Improved Accuracy & Collaboration: A consolidated data workflow eliminates outdated and inefficient survey methodologies such as having to manually administer questionnaires, while enabling business users and privacy champions to collaborate, increasing information accuracy and streamlining the process of recording, reviewing, and approving data processing activities.
- Simplified Operations: Building a comprehensive and defensible data inventory today is mired in complexity due to the exponential volumes of data being ingested on a daily basis and the dynamic nature of the data itself. Exterro Smart Data Inventory helps users mitigate much of this complexity by reducing the effort required to map, organize and contextualize all relevant data and eases inventory maintenance by automatically tracking and capturing any changes within an environment.