Smart-advertising company gains visibility into cloud data

Visibility into the data stored within your cloud ecosystem is vital for cloud data security and regulatory compliance, but for many companies, it’s also a business-critical need. Take Rise, a company that offers publishers a smart-advertising platform, for example. Rise’s platform uses AI and proprietary algorithms to optimize ad targeting and monetization. These offerings rely on the ability to access and use vast quantities of data.

“We have a lot of data stored in our AWS environment that originates from a lot of different sources and applications and it’s important that we have full visibility into how and where it is stored and to make sure it is being used to its full potential” – VP of R&D

In this context, shadow data (unknown, hidden data) represents more than a security risk — not to downplay that it is, in fact, a serious security concern; but because data is essential to the platform’s contextual targeting functionality, these forgotten and unmanaged datastores may contain lost business opportunities.

To combat the business and security risks of proliferating shadow data, Rise needed a solution that could:

• Provide a comprehensive view of the data stored in their S3, RDS, EC2, Elasticache, and DynamoDB.
• Track when, how, and by whom that data is accessed.
• Enhance access to critical data.
• Identify redundant or obsolete data for reduced cloud expenditure.

Rise implemented Laminar’s agile data security solution to better manage their data in the cloud. They were pleased with Laminar’s easy deployment and ability to autonomously identify shadow data.

“I didn’t have to configure anything, and the deployment was super simple. This is important for two reasons: first, I wanted a tool with fast time to value and without the overhead, and second, because I didn’t know where we might have shadow data, so pinpointing to specific assets is impossible.” – VP of R&D

Learn more about Rise and Laminar’s partnership in the case study.