Best Practices: Automatically Tag and Label Sensitive Data

As organizations scale their use of Google Cloud, sensitive data is rapidly expanding across cloud storage, data lakes, and analytics platforms, often without clear visibility or consistent control. Native cloud security tools focus on infrastructure and configuration risk, but they do not provide a reliable understanding of what sensitive data actually exists inside cloud environments, or how that data is being accessed and used.

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Sentra secures Google Cloud by delivering deep, AI-driven data discovery and classification across cloud-native services, unstructured data stores, and shared environments. With continuous visibility into where sensitive data resides and how exposure evolves over time, security teams can accurately assess real risk, enforce data governance, and reduce the likelihood of data leaks, without slowing cloud adoption.

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As data extends into Google Workspace and powers Gemini AI, Sentra ensures sensitive information remains governed and protected across collaboration and AI workflows. When integrated with Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) solutions, Sentra enriches cloud posture findings with trusted data context, transforming cloud security signals into prioritized, actionable insight based on actual data exposure.

The Challenge:
Cloud, Collaboration, and AI Without Data Context

Modern enterprises face three converging challenges:

• Massive data sprawl across cloud infrastructure, SaaS collaboration tools, and data lakes
• Unstructured data dominance, representing ~80% of enterprise data and the hardest to classify
• AI systems like Gemini that ingest, transform, and generate sensitive data at scale

While CSPMs, like Wiz, excel at identifying misconfigurations, attack paths, and identity risk, they cannot determine what sensitive data actually exists inside exposed resources. Lightweight or native DSPM signals lack the accuracy and depth required to support confident risk decisions.

Security teams need more than posture - they need data truth.

Data Security Built for the Google Ecosystem

Sentra secures sensitive data across Google Cloud, Google Workspace, and AI-driven environments with accuracy, scale, and control -going beyond visibility to actively reduce data risk.

Key Sentra Capabilities

• AI-Driven Data Discovery & Classification
  Precisely identifies PII, PCI, credentials, secrets, IP, and regulated data across structured and unstructured sources—so teams can trust the results.
• Best-in-Class Unstructured Data Coverage
  Accurately classifies long-form documents and free text, addressing the largest source of enterprise data risk.
• Petabyte-Scale, High-Performance Scanning
  Fast, efficient scanning designed for cloud and data lake scale without operational disruption.
• Unified, Agentless Coverage
  Consistent visibility and classification across Google Cloud, Google Workspace, data lakes, SaaS, and on-prem.
• Enabling Intelligent Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
  Data-aware controls prevent oversharing, public exposure, and misuse—including in AI workflows—driven by accurate classification, not static rules.‍
• Continuous Risk Visibility
  Tracks where sensitive data lives and how exposure changes over time, enabling proactive governance and faster response.

Strengthening Security Across Google Cloud & Workspace

Google Cloud

Sentra enhances Google Cloud security by:

• Discovering and classifying sensitive data in GCS, BigQuery, and data lakes
• Identifying overexposed and publicly accessible sensitive data
• Detecting toxic combinations of sensitive data and risky configurations
• Enabling policy-driven governance aligned to compliance and risk tolerance

Google Workspace

Sentra secures the largest source of unstructured data by:

• Classifying sensitive content in Docs, Sheets, Drive, and shared files
• Detecting oversharing and external exposure
• Identifying shadow data created through collaboration
• Supporting audit and compliance with clear reporting

Enabling Secure and Responsible Gemini AI

Gemini AI introduces a new class of data risk. Sensitive information is no longer static, it is continuously ingested and generated by AI systems.

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Sentra enables secure and responsible AI adoption by:

• Providing visibility into what sensitive data feeds AI workflows
• Preventing regulated or confidential data from entering AI systems
• Supporting governance policies for responsible AI use
• Reducing the risk of AI-driven data leakage

Wiz + Sentra: Comprehensive Cloud and Data Security

Wiz identifies where cloud risk exists.
Sentra determines what data is actually at risk.

Together, Sentra + Wiz Deliver:

• Enrichment of Wiz findings with accurate, context-rich data classification
• Detection of real exposure, not just theoretical misconfiguration
• Better alert prioritization based on business impact
• Clear, defensible risk reporting for executives and boards

Security teams add Sentra because Wiz alone is not enough to accurately assess data risk at scale, especially for unstructured and AI-driven data.

Business Outcomes

With Sentra securing data across Google Cloud, Google Workspace, and Gemini AI—and enhancing Wiz—organizations achieve:

• Reduced enterprise risk through data-driven prioritization
• Improved compliance readiness beyond minimum regulatory requirements
• Higher SOC efficiency with less noise and faster response
• Confident AI adoption with enforceable governance
• Clearer executive and board-level risk visibility

“Wiz shows us cloud risk. Sentra shows us whether that risk actually impacts sensitive data. Together, they give us confidence to move fast with Google and Gemini without losing control.”
— CISO, Enterprise Organization

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As cloud, collaboration, and AI converge, security leaders must go beyond infrastructure-only security. Sentra provides the data intelligence layer that makes Google Cloud security stronger, Google Workspace safer, Gemini AI responsible, and Wiz actionable.

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Sentra helps organizations secure what matters most, their critical data.

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Introduction: Why Writing Good Policies Matters

In modern cloud and AI-driven environments, having security policies in place is no longer enough. The quality of those policies directly shapes your ability to prevent data exposure, reduce noise, and drive meaningful response. A well-written policy helps to enforce real control and provides clarity in how to act. A poorly written one, on the other hand, fuels alert fatigue, confusion, or worse - blind spots.

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This article explores how to write effective, low-noise, action-oriented security policies that align with how data is actually used.

What Is a Data Security Policy?

A data security policy is a set of rules that defines how your organization handles sensitive data. It specifies who can access what information, under what conditions, and what happens when those rules are violated. But here's the key difference: a good data security policy isn't just a document that sits in a compliance folder. It's an active control that detects risky behavior and triggers specific responses. While many organizations write policies that sound impressive but create endless alerts, effective policies target real risks and drive meaningful action. The goal isn't to monitor everything, it's to catch the activities that actually matter and respond quickly when they happen.

What Makes a Data Security Policy “Good”?

Before you begin drafting, ask yourself: what problem is this policy solving, and why does it matter? 

A good data security policy isn’t just a technical rule sitting in a console, it’s a sensor for meaningful risk. It should define what activity you want to detect, under what conditions it should trigger, and who or what is in scope, so that it avoids firing on safe, expected scenarios.

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Key characteristics of an effective policy:
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• Clear intent: protects against a well-defined risk, not a vague category of threats.
  
• Actionable outcome: leads to a specific, repeatable response.
  
• Low noise: triggers only on unusual or risky patterns, not normal operations.
  
• Context-aware: accounts for business processes and expected data use.
  
  

💡 Tip: If you can’t explain in one sentence what you want to detect and what action should happen when it triggers, your policy isn’t ready for production.

Turning Risk Into Actionable Policy

Data security policies should always be grounded in real business risk, not just what’s technically possible to monitor. A strong policy targets scenarios that could genuinely harm the organization if left unchecked.

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Questions to ask before creating a policy:
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• What specific behavior poses a risk to our sensitive or regulated data?
  
• Who might trigger it, and why? Is it more likely to be malicious, accidental, or operational?
  
• What exceptions or edge cases should be allowed without generating noise?
  
• What systems will enforce it and who owns the response when it fires?
  
  

Instead of vague statements like “No access to PII”, write with precision:

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“Block and alert on external sharing of customer PII from corporate cloud storage to any domain not on the approved partner list, unless pre-approved via the security exception process.”
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Recommendations:
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• Treat policies like code - start them in monitor-only mode.
  
• Test both sides: validate true positives (catching risky activity) and avoid false positives (triggering on normal behavior).
  
  

💡 Tip: The best policies are precise enough to detect real risks, but tested enough to avoid drowning teams in noise.

A Good Data Security Policy Should Drive Action

Policies are only valuable if they lead to a decision or action. Without a clear owner or remediation process, alerts quickly become noise. Every policy should generate an alert that leads to accountability.
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Questions to ask:
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• Who owns the alert?
  
• What should happen when it fires?
  
• How quickly should it be resolved?
  
  

💡 Tip: If no one is responsible for acting on a policy’s alerts, it’s not a policy — it’s background noise.

Don’t Ignore the Noise

When too many alerts fire, it’s tempting to dismiss them as an annoyance. But noisy policies are often a signal, not a mistake. Sometimes policies are too broad or poorly scoped. Other times, they point to deeper systemic risks, such as overly open sharing practices or misconfigured controls.
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Recommendations:
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• Investigate noisy policies before silencing them.
  
• Treat excess alerts as a clue to systemic risk.
  
  

💡 Tip: A noisy policy may be exposing the exact weakness you most need to fix.

Know When to Adjust or Retire a Policy

Policies must evolve as your organization, tools, and data change. A rule that made sense last year might be irrelevant or counterproductive today.
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Recommendations:
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• Continuously align policies with evolving risks.
  
• Track key metrics: how often it triggers, severity, and response actions.
  
• Optimize response paths so alerts reach the right owners quickly.
  
• Schedule quarterly or biannual reviews with both security and business stakeholders.
  
  

💡 Tip: The only thing worse than no policy is a stale one that everyone ignores.

Why Smart Policies Matter for Regulated Data

Data security policies aren’t just an internal safeguard, they are how compliance is enforced in practice. Regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS require demonstrable control over sensitive data.

Poorly written policies generate alert fatigue, making it harder to detect real violations. Well-crafted ones reduce the risk of noncompliance, streamline audits, and improve breach response.
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Recommendations:
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• Map each policy directly to a specific regulatory requirement.
  
• Retire rules that create noise without reducing actual risk.
  
  

💡 Tip: If a policy doesn’t map to a regulation or a real risk, it’s adding effort without adding value.

Making Policy Creation Simple, Powerful, and Built for Results 

An effective solution for policy creation should make it easy to get started, provide the flexibility to adapt to your unique environment, and give you the deep data context you need to make policies that actually work. It should streamline the process so you can move quickly without sacrificing control, compliance, or clarity.

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Sentra is that solution. By combining intuitive policy building with deep data context, Sentra simplifies and strengthens the entire lifecycle of policy creation.
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With Sentra, you can:
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• Start fast with out-of-the-box, low-noise controls.
  
• Create custom policies without complexity.
  
• Leverage real-time knowledge of where sensitive data lives and who has access to it.
  
• Continuously tune for low noise with performance metrics.
• Understand which regulations you can adhere to
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💡 Tip: The true value of a policy isn’t how often it triggers, it’s whether it consistently drives the right response.

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Good Policies Start with Good Visibility

The best data security policies are written by teams who know exactly where sensitive data lives, how it moves, who can access it, and what creates risk. Without that visibility, policy writing becomes guesswork. With it, enforcement becomes simple, effective, and sustainable.
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At Sentra, we believe policy creation should be driven by real data, not assumptions. If you’re ready to move from reactive alerts to meaningful control.

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Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is a keystone of enterprise security, yet traditional DLP solutions continue to suffer from high rates of both false positives and false negatives, primarily because they struggle to accurately identify and classify sensitive data in cloud-first environments.

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New advanced data discovery and contextual classification technology directly addresses this gap, transforming DLP from an imprecise, reactive tool into a proactive, highly effective solution for preventing data loss.

Why DLP Solutions Can’t Work Alone

DLP solutions are designed to prevent sensitive or confidential data from leaving your organization, support regulatory compliance, and protect intellectual property and reputation. A noble goal indeed.  Yet DLP projects are notoriously anxiety-inducing for CISOs. On the one hand,  they often generate a high amount of false positives that disrupt legitimate business activities and further exacerbate alert fatigue for security teams.

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What’s worse than false positives? False negatives. Today traditional DLP solutions too often fail to prevent data loss because they cannot efficiently discover and classify sensitive data in dynamic, distributed, and ephemeral cloud environments.

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Traditional DLP faces a twofold challenge: 

• High False Positives: DLP tools often flag benign or irrelevant data as sensitive, overwhelming security teams with unnecessary alerts and leading to alert fatigue.
  
  
• High False Negatives: Sensitive data is frequently missed due to poor or outdated classification, leaving organizations exposed to regulatory, reputational, and operational risks.
  
  

These issues stem from DLP’s reliance on basic pattern-matching, static rules, and limited context. As a result, DLP cannot keep pace with the ways organizations use, store, and share data, resulting in the dual-edged sword of both high false positives and false negatives. Furthermore, the explosion of unstructured data types and shadow IT creates blind spots that traditional DLP solutions cannot detect. As a result, DLP often can’t  keep pace with the ways organizations use, store, and share data. It isn’t that DLP solutions don’t work, rather they lack the underlying discovery and classification of sensitive data needed to work correctly.

AI-Powered Data Discovery & Classification Layer

Continuous, accurate data classification is the foundation for data security. An AI-powered data discovery and classification platform can act as the intelligence layer that makes DLP work as intended. Here’s how Sentra complements the core limitations of DLP solutions:

1. Continuous, Automated Data Discovery

• Comprehensive Coverage: Discovers sensitive data across all data types and locations - structured and unstructured sources, databases, file shares, code repositories, cloud storage, SaaS platforms, and more.
  
  
• Cloud-Native & Agentless: Scans your entire cloud estate (AWS, Azure, GCP, Snowflake, etc.) without agents or data leaving your environment, ensuring privacy and scalability.
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• Shadow Data Detection: Uncovers hidden or forgotten (“shadow”) data sets that legacy tools inevitably miss, providing a truly complete data inventory.

2. Contextual, Accurate Classification

• AI-Driven Precision: Sentra proprietary LLMs and hybrid models achieve over 95% classification accuracy, drastically reducing both false positives and false negatives.
  
  
• Contextual Awareness: Sentra goes beyond simple pattern-matching to truly understand business context, data lineage, sensitivity, and usage, ensuring only truly sensitive data is flagged for DLP action.
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• Custom Classifiers: Enables organizations to tailor classification to their unique business needs, including proprietary identifiers and nuanced data types, for maximum relevance.

3. Real-Time, Actionable Insights

• Sensitivity Tagging: Automatically tags and labels files with rich metadata, which can be fed directly into your DLP for more granular, context-aware policy enforcement.
  
  
• API Integrations: Seamlessly integrates with existing DLP, IR, ITSM, IAM, and compliance tools, enhancing their effectiveness without disrupting existing workflows.
• Continuous Monitoring: Provides ongoing visibility and risk assessment, so your DLP is always working with the latest, most accurate data map.

How Sentra Supercharges DLP Solutions

Better Classification Means Less Noise, More Protection

• Reduce Alert Fatigue: Security teams focus on real threats, not chasing false alarms, which results in better resource allocation and faster response times.
  
  
• Accelerate Remediation: Context-rich alerts enable faster, more effective incident response, minimizing the window of exposure.
  
  
• Regulatory Compliance: Accurate classification supports GDPR, PCI DSS, CCPA, HIPAA, and more, reducing audit risk and ensuring ongoing compliance.
  
  
• Protect IP and Reputation: Discover and secure proprietary data, customer information, and business-critical assets, safeguarding your organization’s most valuable resources.
  
  

Why Sentra Outperforms Legacy Approaches

Sentra’s hybrid classification framework combines rule-based systems for structured data with advanced LLMs and zero-shot learning for unstructured and novel data types.

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This versatility ensures:

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• Scalability: Handles petabytes of data across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, adapting as your data landscape evolves.
  
• Adaptability: Learns and evolves with your business, automatically updating classifications as data and usage patterns change.
  
• Privacy: All scanning occurs within your environment - no data ever leaves your control, ensuring compliance with even the strictest data residency requirements.

Use Case: Where DLP Alone Fails, Sentra Prevails

A financial services company uses a leading DLP solution to monitor and prevent the unauthorized sharing of sensitive client information, such as account numbers and tax IDs, across cloud storage and email. The DLP is configured with pattern-matching rules and regular expressions for identifying sensitive data.

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What Goes Wrong:

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An employee uploads a spreadsheet to a shared cloud folder. The spreadsheet contains a mix of client names, account numbers, and internal project notes. However, the account numbers are stored in a non-standard format (e.g., with dashes, spaces, or embedded within other text), and the file is labeled with a generic name like “Q2_Projects.xlsx.” The DLP solution, relying on static patterns and file names, fails to recognize the sensitive data and allows the file to be shared externally. The incident goes undetected until a client reports a data breach.

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How Sentra Solves the Problem:

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To address this, the security team set out to find a solution capable of discovering and classifying unstructured data without creating more overhead. They selected Sentra for its autonomous ability to continuously discover and classify all types of data across their hybrid cloud environment. Once deployed, Sentra immediately recognizes the context and content of files like the spreadsheet that enabled the data leak. It accurately identifies the embedded account numbers—even in non-standard formats—and tags the file as highly sensitive.

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This sensitivity tag is automatically fed into the DLP, which then successfully enforces strict sharing controls and alerts the security team before any external sharing can occur. As a result, all sensitive data is correctly classified and protected, the rate of false negatives was dramatically reduced, and the organization avoids further compliance violations and reputational harm.

Getting Started with Sentra is Easy

1. Deploy Agentlessly: No complex installation. Sentra integrates quickly and securely into your environment, minimizing disruption.
   
   
2. Automate Discovery & Classification: Build a living, accurate inventory of your sensitive data assets, continuously updated as your data landscape changes.
   
   
3. Enhance DLP Policies: Feed precise, context-rich sensitivity tags into your DLP for smarter, more effective enforcement across all channels.
   
   
4. Monitor Continuously: Stay ahead of new risks with ongoing discovery, classification, and risk assessment, ensuring your data is always protected.
   
   

“Sentra’s contextual classification engine turns DLP from a reactive compliance checkbox into a proactive, business-enabling security platform.”

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Fuel DLP with Automatic Discovery & Classification

DLP is an essential data protection tool, but without accurate, context-aware data discovery and classification, it’s incomplete and often ineffective. Sentra supercharges your DLP with continuous data discovery and accurate classification, ensuring you find and protect what matters most—while eliminating noise, inefficiency, and risk. 

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Ready to see how Sentra can supercharge your DLP? Contact us for a demo today.

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