Person Cards® – The Holy Grail of Data Discovery

Cole PrudenData Discovery, GDPR, PHI, PII

By 2025, the global datasphere is estimated to hold as much as 175 zettabytes of data. How can companies today possibly have a chance to organize that much information? The answer: Person Cards®.

More Data, More Problems

175 zettabytes of data worldwide? Considering a single zettabyte is equal to a trillion gigabytes (yes, with a ‘T’), the actual amount of information stored across the planet is unimaginable for the human brain. And yet, standard regulations like the GDPR, PCI, HIPAA, and more demand that all that data be sifted through one by one and stored securely.

SOURCE: FORBES

How can a company with seemingly endless terabytes of data on its employees, clients, and users ever hope to stay compliant and protect the information it’s been trusted with? And that’s not all. How are companies also expected to adhere to DSAR requests and the dreaded breach incident?

What are Person Cards®?

Luckily, we have automated technology on our side. The days of manual data searches and organizing information by hand are far behind us. Using a data discovery tool like PII Tools is the first step to locating specific PII, PCI, and PHI, including structured and unstructured data. But the real game changer comes as an answer to the question: “What do I do with this information once it’s been discovered?”

Person Cards® is PII Tools’ solution for organizing your inconceivable amounts of stored data. But what exactly is a Peron Card, and how does it work?

PII Tools automatically links up every instance of data stored on an individual (the aforementioned PII, PCI, PHI, etc.) that its AI detectors have discovered. This includes everything from that person’s name, email, and DoB, to their credit card information, health status, bank details… Essentially, whatever type of personal data you store, PII Tools will detect it and bunch it all together.

And what does it do with all that bunched data? It turns it into a distinctive Person Card for each person. The solution then gathers all of these unique Person Cards together and exports them into an easy-to-use, easy-to-read spreadsheet. And lastly, any unassigned PII is grouped together for your own quality control and manual review, ensuring no drop of data is left behind.

Now, that all sounds well and good, but what are you even supposed to do with a giant spreadsheet of personalized Person Cards? Well… The opportunities are endless. Let’s go through a few examples of how you could use Person Cards® on a daily basis.

1. Create Useful Datasets

For starters, you can automatically discover all of the people who appear in a specific dataset. This allows you to pinpoint the particular type of personal data you’re looking for and create a convenient list of everyone linked to that data.

Getting ready for an audit and want to ensure every instance of PHI has been stored and protected correctly? Then quickly run the software on the given dataset, which will automatically spit out a spreadsheet of all the PHI and the Person Cards for each individual involved. Now, do the same thing for data specific to the CCPA, the GLBA, or whatever regulation comes to mind.

2. Quickly Handle DSARs

With Person Cards®, responding to Data Subject Access Requests (DSAR) has never been easier. In 2022, researchers found that a single DSAR can cost a company as much as $1,400. But Person Cards® make it so you’ve already got a spreadsheet of all the information a DSAR requires right at your fingertips.

All it takes is a few clicks, one or two prompts typed into the spreadsheet search box, and you can easily locate a specific user, including all their private and stored data, simply ready to go. There’s no need to spend thousands of dollars a year on running search inquiries, collecting user files, compiling them into a DSAR-compliant format, and sending them to the requester. Using Person cards® means all that work is already done and shippable at all times.

3. Breach Incidents

Lastly – and potentially the most crucial of all – we have breach incidents. Anytime a data leak occurs, everyone is suddenly scrambling to mitigate the damages as much as possible while also trying to locate who and what’s been affected.

Person Cards® do much of the heavy lifting when responding to data breaches of any kind. Imagine how quickly and effectively you can locate the impacted parties when you already have every single user, employee, and customer’s stored information organized in a spreadsheet. And if you’re only searching for a certain kind of data that got leaked (like only the user’s Social Security Numbers), then you can instantly locate everybody within that dataset with their SSN listed.

The Holy Grail

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize the nearly endless possibilities and conveniences provided by Person Cards®. There’s a reason we call them the Holy Grail of Data Discovery. It’s simply the best and most efficient way to organize data and quickly locate specific pieces of information, no matter what they might be needed for.

Let our intuitive AI discover everything on your behalf before providing you with the data spreadsheet of your time-saving dreams. Don’t be a hostage to data breaches, DSARs, or regulations – instead, take control of your stored data with Person Cards® by PII Tools.

Unlock Your Full Data Discovery Potential with Person Cards®