Concept Searching Introduces Personally Identifiable Information (PII) Discovery Software Solution

Nov. 18, 2008 - PRLog -- Concept Searching, developers of concept based search, automatic classification, semantic metadata generation, and taxonomy management software have announced the availability of PIIdiscovery, a solution that identifies Personally Identifiable Information (PII) for public and private sector organizations that face regulatory and compliance requirements.

The average cost of a data breach is $6.3 million and ranges anywhere from $225K to $35 million.  Overall 70% of all breaches are due to a mistake or malicious intent by an organization’s own staff.  With information residing in diverse repositories, individual computers, emails, fax systems, and written on forms organizations may be unaware that PII exposures exist.  The potential PII exposures can cause irreparable harm to individuals as well as the organization and the consequences can lead to loss of business, litigation, and criminal and civil penalties.

PIIdiscovery is a unique solution that helps organizations manage the risk associated with enterprise content residing in diverse repositories.  The innovative technology identifies content through advanced meta-tagging and automatic classification features.  As content is created or ingested, PII is automatically identified and classified to a folder for security and review procedures.  Fully customizable, the organization can define PII according to their specific requirements and needs.  Types of PII can include social security numbers, credit card numbers, date of birth, bank account numbers, passports, driver’s license numbers, or any unique organizational descriptors.  Features include automatic metadata tagging and classification of PII based upon its presence within content.  Once identified PII is automatically aggregated into a central location for review and disposition.  PII can be identified from a wide variety of data repositories as well as scanned documents and forms.  

“Enterprises are continually facing the risk of data breaches and PII exposures.  Noncompliance issues can pose great risk to any entity that collects and uses PII in the course of doing business.  The key benefit of PIIdiscovery is to find PII exposures that the organization may not be aware of and protect the data,” said Martin Garland, President of Concept Searching, Inc.  “Another key challenge we address is the ability to track and identify PII from scanned content, such as a form.  With PIIdiscovery, scanned content can be included in the PII identification process.  PIIdiscovery is a proactive approach that can potentially save an organization from the devastating impact of a data breach.”

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Founded in 2002, Concept Searching’s software products deliver advanced search, auto-classification, taxonomy management and advanced metadata tagging solutions from the desktop to the enterprise. Concept Searching is the only statistical metadata generation and classification software company in the world that uses concept extraction and compound term processing to significantly improve access to unstructured information. Headquartered in the U.K. with offices in the U.S. and South Africa, Concept Searching solves the problem of finding, organizing, and managing information capital. For more information about Concept Searching’s solutions and technologies please visit www.conceptsearching.com.