What is Data Classification?
The process of assessing structured or unstructured data and categorizing it based on file type, contents, and other metadata is known as data classification. Data categorization assists organizations in answering critical questions about their data, which informs how they minimize risk and manage data governance standards. It can tell you where your most essential data is stored or what kind of sensitive data your users generate the most frequently. To comply with modern data privacy standards, comprehensive data classification is required (but not sufficient).
Purpose of Data Classification
Risk Mitigation
- Limit access to personally identifiable information (PII)
- Control location and access to intellectual property (IP)
- Reduce attack surface area to sensitive data
- Integrate classification into DLP and other policy-enforcing applications
Governance/Compliance
- Identify data governed by GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, PCI, SOX, and future regulations
- Apply metadata tags to protected data to enable additional tracking and controls
- Enable quarantining, legal hold, archiving and other regulation-required actions
- Facilitate 'Right to be Forgotten' and Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs)
Efficiency and Optimization
- Enable efficient access to content based on type, usage, etc.
- Discover and eliminate stale or redundant data.
- Move heavily utilized data to faster devices or cloud-based infrastructure.
Analytics
- Enable metadata tagging to optimize business activities.
- Inform the organization on location and usage of data.
Ready to get started?
How Data Classification Helps
To secure and manage use, modern data classification methods integrate visual labeling with labels written to the file's metadata. These labels improve the performance of third-party technological solutions by indicating how data should be treated, handled, kept, and finally disposed of.
Data classification reduces the workload associated with data processing while also improving data security and compliance - making your investment in security applications work harder. Organizations can confidently continue their data security journey once data has been classified.

Get accurate data classification results
Improve your grasp of data trends unique to your organization. You'll receive more relevant results if you use compound term processing and statistical analysis instead of keywords and semantic analysis.
Categorize data in a few clicks
Start your investigation in minutes using out-of-the-box rules that identify data protected by GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and other legislation. Create custom rules to find additional data that is important to your organization.
Streamline taxonomy management
In a user-friendly interface, you may create and modify taxonomies. Remove the need to hire an expert whenever you need to create and maintain taxonomies.
Discover specific pieces of content
Find specific data as part of the litigation process, and find all personal data associated with an individual to comply with data subject access requests without downtime or the need to write new rules.
Automate data-related routines
Embed classification information right into the files to improve the accuracy of your DLP or IRM products and streamline data management tasks, such as retaining, archiving, or migrating only specific types of data.
Automatically reduce exposure
Safeguard important files by automatically relocating them to a secure location, deleting rights from global access groups, and redacting confidential content from documents.
Understand your data across your entire environment
Do you want total visibility over your content, whether it's organized or unstructured, on-premises or in the cloud? We’ve got your back
Benefits of Data Classification
According to a cybersecurity study, four out of five businesses have no idea where their important data is or how to safeguard it. This is a significant issue in the effort to keep sensitive data secure, private, and compliant. Organizations get a wide range of benefits by initiating extensive, well-planned data classification processes.
Aspire Other Consulting provides services through eight practices
Aspire Tech is not like just another cybersecurity company. We are a highly passionate team of cybersecurity operatives who are exceptionally talented, experienced, and committed to their clients. Our team is composed of intelligence specialists, analysts, skilled attackers, strategists, and educators.
- Cyber Security Consulting
- Data Center Consulting
- Big Data Consulting
- Backup and DR Consulting
- Infrastructure 24 x 7 Support Consulting
- Enterprise Architecture Consulting
- Customer Relationship Management
- Human Capital Management
- Governance, Risk and Compliance
- Finance and Accounting

White papers, opinion essays, and research studies on current business challenges are part of our active thought leadership program. By selecting the Resource Center tab at the top of this column, you can access these materials.
Secure your remote workforce
If you're looking to increase protection for your organization.
Investigate Business And Financial Misconduct. Evaluate Opportunities and Analyze Risk. Secure Assets And People. Monitor, Remediate And Recover Assets. Respond To And Investigate Data Breaches.