Innovative OCR Capabilities Enable Efficient Classification of Non-Digital Assets, Strengthening Defense Against Cyber Attacks
San Francisco, CA – July 31, 2024 – Normalyze, the pioneer of Data Security Posture Management (DSPM), announced the general availability of its enhanced Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, aimed at fortifying the security posture of healthcare and financial organizations by ensuring that non-digital assets are properly classified before being stored and used.
“Many healthcare and financial transactions involve non-digital assets, including PDF contracts and paper forms filled out in person,” said Amer Deeba, CEO and Co-founder of Normalyze. “These organizations face a tradeoff: either digitize documents without proper classification, which results in data stores filled with potentially sensitive information that is unorganized and at risk—or leave non-digital assets unmanaged, which poses risks of data loss and inefficiency.”
The tradeoff comes at a time when both sectors face increasing threats, as highlighted by the success of ransomware gang BlackCat, who claimed responsibility for hacking several healthcare organizations, disrupting operations, and stealing up to four terabytes of data, including personal information, payment details, and insurance records.
Healthcare and financial institutions handle millions of documents and images filled with personal information, many of them still in hard-copy assets which often include driver’s licenses, credit cards, passports, contracts, and other sensitive information. When these institutions decide to digitize hard-copy assets, it’s crucial to classify them properly as they go. If not, they can easily get overlooked amidst the millions of other files stored in the cloud, leading to blind spots in data compliance and easy targets for attackers.
Revolutionizing Data Management with OCR
Normalyze DSPM for OCR is a foundational step in the process of securing all digital assets. “There is an overwhelming amount of sensitive data in image files, and data left unprotected and unmonitored increases the risk of data exfiltration and breaches,” said Amer. “We are proud to offer the industry’s most comprehensive DSPM platform with OCR.”
Normalyze DSPM for OCR can detect valuable or sensitive data hidden within image files, and then classify and tag it to be handled accordingly, which is crucial for organizations that deal with an overwhelming amount of sensitive data in image files. Normalyze’s agentless platform runs within the customer’s cloud account and continuously scans on-premises, cloud, SaaS, and PaaS environments for new and historical files. When relevant files are found, Normalyze uses OCR-based technology to identify and classify valuable or sensitive data, providing a visual view of the relevant bucket or database where the images are stored, along with associated records, lineage, and permissions.
The platform delivers contextual threat paths and risk visualizations, alerting security teams in situations where sensitive data is at significant risk of exposure. Once detected and classified, Normalyze also provides AI-powered remediation steps to help security and data teams prioritize actions for data at risk.
For a deeper dive into proactive defense strategies for healthcare data, listen to our latest podcast episode with host Dr. Dave Chatterjee: Fortifying Healthcare Data: Proactive Defense Strategies.
About Normalyze
Normalyze is the pioneer in Data Security Posture Management (DSPM), enabling organizations to effectively secure data at scale across SaaS, PaaS, public or multi-cloud, on-prem and hybrid environments. Normalyze fills the security gaps created by complex data landscapes, data lakes, shadow data and Generative AI by accurately and quickly discovering, classifying and visualizing the total data attack surface. With Normalyze, data and security teams can quantify risks and prioritize remediation plans to prevent data breaches, enforce least privilege access to sensitive data, optimize data storage and leverage AI for business.
Founded by industry veterans Ravi Ithal and Amer Deeba, and backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Battery Ventures, Normalyze holds 11 patents in data security and is used by global organizations including Albertsons, Snowflake, Informatica, Beyond Finance and many others.
For more information, please visit normalyze.ai.