Operating in a highly regulated and high-stakes sector, US financial institutions—from top-tier banks to credit unions to financial operations platforms—share the same data security concerns.
- Time-consuming, error-prone manual processes and legacy tools never quite capture the full scope of an ever-evolving data inventory.
- The increasing volume of personally identifiable information (PII) and transaction data creates data sprawl, making it nearly impossible to comply with five-year data retention rules and data privacy mandates.
- Teams are deluged by thousands of unprioritized alerts, slowing down investigation and remediation while ransomware and AI-driven attacks targeting vital data continue to escalate.
Cyera’s unified data security platform eases these pressures for Patelco, BILL, and a leading US bank. Its AI-powered data discovery finds hidden sensitive data, identifies data risk, streamlines compliance, and prioritizes high-criticality vulnerabilities for faster resolution.
Patelco mitigates risk by using AI-powered Cyera to surface “dark data”
Operating for nearly a century in Northern California, Patelco Credit Union is a member-owned not-for-profit financial co-op that serves over half a million people.
Challenge: While Patelco had a solid data governance program with strong controls and well-defined policies within its Snowflake data platform, it faced a major blind spot. The team lacked visibility into where its “dark data” (unstructured and unmanaged sensitive data) lived and where the risk was concentrated across its on-premises and Azure cloud environment.
Action: Bhavani Palukuri, Vice President Enterprise Architecture & AI Innovation, implemented Cyera as a foundational platform for data discovery and classification. Integrating natively with Patelco’s hybrid architecture, Cyera surfaces previously unseen data and its vulnerabilities. This enabled its Microsoft Purview solution to apply data protection controls and enforce policies and driving faster incident response by following operational playbooks.
Outcomes: Cyera is a big boon for the security team and governance team. The platform has proven its value through:
- Targeted risk reduction
- Compliance audit readiness
- Detailed executive reporting on data risk and security maturity
- Proactive governance
“Data protection maturity is not just about adding one more tool, it’s about enabling execution of the governance. Otherwise, this just becomes theoretical work. We are a lot more confident and more focused on how we reduce our risk, now that the team can see where high-risk sensitive data is concentrated,” commented Palukuri. (Read the case study.)
BILL leverages AI-powered Cyera to optimize remediation with full visibility into data
Since its inception in 2006, automated financial operation platform BILL (formerly Bill.com) has grown by strategic acquisition.
Challenge: The number one priority for former SVP and CISO Rinki Sethi was improving data management in a fragmented environment resulting from multiple acquisitions. Manual tracking and siloed solutions failed to provide clear insight into where sensitive financial and customer data lives, how it flows across the organization, and which data truly needs to be protected.
Action: When she started evaluating data management solutions, Sethi was looking for more than just data visibility. She needed an AI-native data security posture management (DSPM) platform that would scale as BILL’s security program matures. That’s what got her excited about Cyera.
Outcomes: In less than one month, Cyera provided BILL with:
- Full, real-time visibility into its data across the cloud and SaaS
- Automated processes replacing time-consuming manual data tracking
- More efficient, targeted remediation based on accurate insights
“Cyera has changed the game around DSPM because of how amazing their technology and team are,” said Sethi. (Watch the video.)
Leading bank uses Cyera to swap alert fatigue for prioritization by identifying 16,000 false positives
Due to a failed legacy data loss prevention (DLP), this leading US bank was forced to stall its document retention initiative, a program essential for regulatory compliance, limiting legal liability, and minimizing cyber risk.
Challenge: The bank’s existing tool was unable to identify and tag redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT) data across files shares and Microsoft 365. The security team was also drowning in DLP alerts, unable to distinguish truly risky events from false positives. Without shared and trusted visibility into the bank’s entire data estate, cross-functional data, privacy, and security teams could not make informed decisions.
Action: CIO Jorge Perez revived the document retention initiative by adopting Cyera Omni DLP. Over a six-month period, Cyera experts collaborated with his team to operationalize the platform. Together, they configured it for the bank’s hybrid infrastructure, discovered data across the cloud and on premises, and built customized automation capabilities.
Outcomes: By incorporating Cyera into its day-to-day operations, the bank quickly achieved tangible benefits:
- Automated document retention
- AI-driven compliance through continuous data discovery, classification, and tagging
- Data risk mitigation through deep insights into vulnerabilities, including Microsoft file oversharing
- Noise reduction by reducing 16,000 false positive events to just a handful that really matter, saving hours every week
“Cyera Omni DLP has really been able to, through AI, identify what’s really important, distinguishing between what looks like normal business processes versus things that seem a little bit abnormal. It’s been really helpful to help us focus on the things that really matter,” remarked Perez. (Watch the video.)
Cyera delivers high value for financial services organizations
Financial sector leaders choose Cyera’s AI-native platform to transform their data governance. With automated data discovery, they get a comprehensive view into their data environment, enabling them to enhance governance, streamline compliance, and accelerate risk remediation.
Learn how Cyera can help you level up your data security program. Contact us today to book a demo.
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