Guild chose MIND to secure vital company and customer data

Guild is an education-management company that unlocks opportunities for America’s workforce. The company was founded in 2015 with a mission to make higher education accessible for the masses, specifically targeted at upskilling adult workers who might otherwise be unlikely to pursue higher learning.

Guild partners with many of the largest employers in the country, including Walmart, Target, Disney and PepsiCo. With so many users of their platform—more than six million in 2023 alone—there’s a staggering amount of data needing to be secured. Sensitive data includes personally identifiable information (PII) like social security numbers, as well as company secrets, cloud keys, employer data and financial information.

Guild didn’t want to build out a full DLP team. What they wanted was a solution that could be managed by their existing security team—without taxing their budget, time or resources. “Being able to deploy a data loss prevention program not only seamlessly, but with a small team and not a huge hit to the budget…that was a big win for me,” said Julie Chickillo, Vice President of Information Security at Guild. Plus, MIND was impressively easy to deploy. “Even that same day we were seeing value,” she added.

“To deploy MIND, from the minute it was stood up, it took minutes, literally minutes. The built-in integrations and connectors made the process extremely fast.”

Guild also wanted a complete solution—one that could track data at rest, in motion and in use across many different sources. “Before, we had zero visibility across data sources, and we certainly couldn't correlate across them,” said Chickillo. “Let's say we had a million documents, we had no idea what they were. With MIND, we were able to get immediate visibility into the types of documents we had.” When MIND was implemented, Guild was able to take swift action to prevent data loss.

“MIND gives us a single-pane view of where our data is, where it's going, how it's moving, who's touching what.”

MIND can help address diverse data security use cases, but an urgent and unexpected one occurred for Guild during recent layoffs.

“We recently had a layoff and suspected people from the impacted list might send documents in emails. We were able to fine-tune a policy and actually start getting proactive alerts about people sending themselves information that they shouldn’t be.”

“If they suspected they might be on a layoff list, or once the layoffs happened, we could see if somebody else at Guild started sending impacted employees documents. And so that's been really helpful and inspired us to go further in our data loss prevention program.” Even in the midst of chaos and uncertainty, MIND was able to shine the light in difficult situations.

Guild attempted to manually classify and tag their sensitive files through employee involvement, however, they quickly found out the effort was ineffective and inaccurate. “We had thousands of documents that were not classified. And asking end users to go in and classify thousands of their docs was just not going to be possible,” said Chickillo.

“MIND has been able to help us surface classifications based on their AI model and help us push classifications back onto the document, preventing us from having to ask people to take hours and hours to go through their documents just to add classification. So for us it's been a way to automate our data loss prevention program.”

“The context that we get in MIND is actually really helpful. There's a really nice layout of when the document was created, what kind of document it is and how it's being shared,” said Chickillo. "The activity log has been the most helpful. In some of our investigations, you're able to see not only how it's being shared, but you can see if it's downloaded and how other enterprise search tools are interacting with it."

“We don't want everything to show up in our enterprise search engine, so we're able to see clearly when that's happening and then we can take action if we don't want it showing up there.” Context is critical to better understand the level of data sensitivity, risk severity of policy violations and conducting investigations and remediation.

Guild’s usage of older, legacy solutions wasn’t positive. “My experience with data loss prevention tools historically has been a high number of false positives,” said Chickillo. “This is why I was hesitant to even start a DLP program here at Guild. You really have to build out an entire team just to support handling the false positives.”

“My experience with the team at MIND is so positive. I can't say enough about the core team that's been working with us. Anytime we ask a question or ask for a feature addition, we get such a fast response,” said Chickillo. “And when it shows up in the product, it actually looks good, too. It’s seamless.”

Before meeting MIND, Guild was experiencing the heavy challenges of managing information security in a remote-first environment. On a daily basis, thousands of employees across the globe were moving data and documents across countless tools and platforms. Since then, MIND has given Guild newfound confidence in their ability to build a strong DLP program and prevent data loss. And, gave them immeasurable peace-of-mind knowing their users’ data would be well-protected.