Webinar | Knowing your data through classification | Members only

Classification helps you organise and understand your data, and then commercialise it (law)fully. It enables you to track your data and handle it according to the way your organisation has told you you need to. Before you can do anything with data you need to classify it.

If you don’t classify your data, how will you know when you have to delete or archive it? How will you know where your most sensitive information sets live? How do you retain transactional data for the retention period the law prescribes if you don’t know what transaction data you have? How do you mask account numbers if you don’t know what the law defines an account number to be? This is why data classification is so important. Let’s look at some examples.

When you classify your data, the opportunities with what you can do with it grows. You can commercialise the data – e.g. in accordance with the classification scheme adopted by the organisation.

There are multiple things to consider when you decide how to classify your data. The following will influence the classifications you choose.

• legal requirements – there are many laws, rules, codes or standards that require you to classify data.
• values – the values of your organisation.
• criticality – how critical is the data to your business?
• sensitivity to unauthorised disclosure or modification – how sensitive is the data?

Data classification is part of data mapping, which in turn is part of activity mapping. How do they differ? You need to know your data to know the relevant facts when protecting personal data. Data classification is often done as part of a data discovery exercise. Information or data law has a direct impact.

Outcomes

• Motivate why your organisation must classify data by considering the benefits you can gain.
• Put the right governance in place by knowing the purpose of a data classification policy (an aspect of a data governance policy) and a data classification matrix.
• Identify the best software tools (or legal tech) to use by looking at some options.

Panel

• Michalsons: John Giles, Ashlynn Mafuva and Tayla Pinto

Attendees

This event is only for members of the Michalsons data protection programme. Members can attend this webinar for no additional charge – it is included in their subscription. They can simply register for the event. Not yet a member? Join the programme now.