Granular Visibility in Days with Transcend Data Discovery

Understanding where your data lives is foundational to effective privacy programs. Imagine, without a comprehensive data map in place, trying to create a record of processing activities (ROPA) for GDPR Article 30 compliance or trying to delete a consumer’s personal data across all your systems.

Traditional methods of data mapping i.e. capturing data systems, types, and purposes of processing in a spreadsheet are time-intensive and prone to errors. Meanwhile, with a legacy privacy platform, you’re still often required to conduct extensive internal surveys of data owners, as well as internal enablement sessions to support proper survey completion. With both options, the data mapping process can take months to complete—and by the time you’re done, the inventory just created is often already out-of-date.

A comprehensive, up-to-date data inventory is the cornerstone of your compliance program—helping you reduce risk by operationalizing privacy tasks while enabling business growth with trusted, compliant data. That’s why it’s critical to find a truly automated data mapping solution that empowers full visibility into your data systems and the data points within.

Quickly discover all your business systems with Silo Discovery

Transcend Silo Discovery enables a truly automated way to find all of your company’s data systems —helping you quickly create a list of all your company’s databases, systems, and tools. You can then enrich this list with other information, such as purposes of processing, as required by relevant laws.

In 2023 alone, Transcend customers found over 4,500+ systems through Silo Discovery.

To keep your Data Inventory comprehensive and up-to-date, Transcend uses Silo Discovery plugins to automatically detect new data systems used by your company. To get started, just connect the plugin, turn on Silo Discovery, and we’ll begin scanning for systems. Examples of plugins include:

• Single-sign-on providers, such as Okta or OneLogin
• Cloud-hosting providers, including Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure
• Customer data platforms, like Segment
• Your codebase, including support for Mobile Apps, which will have information about vendor SDKs
• Your websites, which can be integrated to detect new ad pixels, analytics tools, and any other client-side tracking technologies

Using Silo Discovery to kickstart your data mapping project saves weeks of manual effort. It also offers built-in default fields to ensure you’re capturing core information about each system. Having this context alongside your inventory minimizes manual steps for required privacy tasks, like creating a ROPA report or completing Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIA).

Kat Vetrakova, Head of Privacy & Security at GoCardless, reinforces the benefits of having full visibility into the company’s data systems:

Having this source of truth is essential to all of your compliance efforts, so it’s included free for all Transcend customers.

Increase visibility with automated data point classification

Once your different data silos have been discovered, Transcend helps you find and classify personal and sensitive data. Understanding your data at this level supports compliance with regional regulations, such as Maryland’s requirement for limiting access to consumer health data to those bound to confidentiality.

Transcend customers have been able to find and understand over 8.1 million data points within their tools. Implementation, even at this comprehensive level, can be done in weeks.

Transcend automates this deeper discovery for every connected system, but has two solutions depending on the type of integration you need.

• Structured Discovery is used for the majority of your integrations, including databases and SaaS apps like your CRM.
• Unstructured Discovery is used for file storage tools such as AWS S3 or Google Drive.

Both solutions offer insight into what categories of data points, such as personal identifiers, exist. They also scan field names and lightly sample data to verify field classification. Unstructured Discovery, however, will also group those datapoints by the files within your tool.

Making your Data Inventory actionable

With Transcend, automating your workflows extends beyond comprehensive data discovery. You’ll also be able to:

• Generate a GDPR-compliant ROPA report
• Create and attach Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIA) to each system
• Fulfill data subject requests (DSR) to access, correct, or delete personal data
• Enforce user consent choices for web or mobile interfaces

Get in touch with our team to see how Data Discovery can empower increased visibility for your business. Get a comprehensive data inventory, including underlying data points, within weeks.