OneTrust enhances data discovery, governance with AI-powered document classification for unstructured data

ATLANTA, May 4, 2023 -- OneTrust, the market-defining leader for trust intelligence, announces artificial intelligence (AI)-driven document classification to help organizations more accurately and completely identify and classify unstructured data and automatically apply governance and protection policies.

"An organization's data is what fuels innovation and gives them a competitive edge," said Blake Brannon, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at OneTrust. "Yet, data sprawl and lack of visibility into where sensitive data lives across the organization can quickly turn that data into an Achilles' heel, risking the financial and reputational impacts of breach and increasingly important data misuse. Using AI to classify unstructured documents at scale, organizations can automatically apply the right policies to protect their data and become more data-driven, knowing data is being used responsibly across the business." 

OneTrust's AI-driven document classification capability:

• Analyzes full file content and context: OneTrust uses AI to analyze the entire context, patterns, and terms within an unstructured file to not only identify the terms and classifications in the file, but also the type of file. Common examples include resumes, financial statements, source code, and medical records.
• Automates data policies such as data retention: Many retention requirements are targeted to specific types of documents, such as resumes and medical records. Tagging documents according to this full context, not only the terms found within, better enables organizations to understand which retention policies apply and automate remediation actions such as deletion and redaction.

This capability joins a number of powerful identification and classification capabilities available through OneTrust Data Discovery:

• Named entity recognition (NER) identifies exact named entities such as people, organizations, and locations within unstructured data.
• Optical character recognition (OCR) AI models extract characters from images, including printed or handwritten text.
• Security classifiers for API keys for AWS, Azure, and Google, plus encryption keys and secrets, passwords, and usernames reduce the risk of exposure through a data leak or breach.
• Regulatory intelligence enhances jurisdictional insights by correlating classified personally identifiable information (PII) with applicable laws and regulations, such as CPRA.

Automated, intelligent data discovery and classification is the first step on an organization's journey to responsible data use and governance. AI-driven classification saves time and effort by classifying data at scale to decrease manual intervention and increase accuracy. To tackle data sprawl, organizations can minimize their data footprint and reduce data risk by automatically applying retention and deletion policies to ensure only the necessary and relevant data is stored.

OneTrust Data Discovery is part of the OneTrust Privacy and Data Governance Cloud which offers one platform for security, marketing, and privacy teams to discover, control, and activate the responsible use of data throughout their organization.