How a Dental Insurance Provider Modernized Data Loss Prevention with Cyera

This dental insurance provider is a leading dental benefits organization serving millions of members. Operating as an association of member companies, the organization manages a complex flow of Protected Health Information (PHI), including data collected from all its member companies. The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is tasked with protecting this sensitive data while navigating a landscape of strict and complex regulatory requirements.

“Legacy DLP just wasn’t working for us. It was noisy, expensive, and didn’t give us confidence that we were actually protecting member data. With Cyera and Omni DLP, we’re finally moving toward a model that’s practical and cloud-aligned. We have clearer visibility into where our PHI lives and how it moves, which puts us much closer to realizing a truly functional data loss prevention program.” -CISO at a dental insurance Provider

The CISO describes the company as a "complicated beast." The primary challenges are (1) maintaining regulatory compliance and (2) managing data across different states and member companies. PHI flows through an intricate end-to-end lifecycle: from a dental claim at the provider level, through ingestion at the association, and back to regional members for claims management. Protecting this data throughout its journey is a massive undertaking, further complicated by an environment where data grows at a "ridiculous rate," as the CISO put it. 

The company relied heavily on AWS but initially struggled to see where its data lived. This visibility gap was worsened by legacy Data Loss Prevention (DLP) tools that failed to meet the team's expectations. The CISO characterized legacy DLP as "completely ineffective" - costly, noisy, and low-return, delivering too many false positives and requiring so much manual review that teams spent more time investigating alerts than protecting truly sensitive data. This "noise" left the team vulnerable, especially as the rise of agentic AI introduced new risks regarding how non-human identities access member information. The organization had to move beyond theoretical controls to a system capable of handling the scale of its member footprint.

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The team partnered with Cyera to design and begin early implementation of a modern data security program, with Cyera Omni DLP as a central part of the approach. The initial focus was not on immediate large-scale remediation, but on gaining accurate visibility into sensitive data and setting a clear direction for how DLP should function across the organization's cloud-centric environment. They began working toward:

• End-to-end Visibility: Better visibility into how sensitive data flows through cloud services and across its lifecycle
• Accurate Classification: More reliable identification and classification of regulated data, including PHI.
• Noise Reduction: Advancing a more effective approach to DLP, addressing historical challenges with false positives and limited efficacy
• Identity Integration: Aligning data security considerations with both human and non-human access patterns.
• AI Access Control: Treating AI as an identity so that, in the CISO's words, it "only has access to the data that it is allowed to," and monitoring those interactions accurately.
• Gaining visibility into how data moves through AWS services: The CISO explained that "by implementing this with that cloud-centric model in mind, we can use more natural AWS services to help give us visibility through our data security program into where that data ends up."
• DataWatcher Implementation: Cyera's DataWatcher team has begun engaging directly with end users to help establish the cultural and operational foundations for the mature data security program that this Dental Insurance Provider  is building.

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