OpenWeb uses MIND to modernize and automate data loss prevention

OpenWeb is a rapidly growing social engagement platform that elevates an open exchange of ideas across communities online. Their mission is to improve the quality of these conversations by helping creators and publishers thrive in a safe and trusted way. With more than 700 publishers and 100 million users monthly, the amount of data being collected on an ongoing basis is impressively huge.

Before MIND, OpenWeb relied on data loss prevention (DLP) tools that were plagued with false positives. The volume of false positives made it clear that these solutions were unreliable. They were also labor-intensive, causing the security team to be stuck manually reviewing alerts, leading to inefficiencies and risk exposure.

“False positives were a huge problem. We couldn’t trust the data we were receiving. It wasn’t reliable and it wasn’t helping us make decisions. Instead, we were wasting time and resources.”

As with most companies, OpenWeb is collecting data all the time. Some is created internally in the course of doing business like source code, operational, employee and customer information (PII). Safeguarding information from business partners and publishers is also a priority for OpenWeb. End user data is among the most sensitive. All of this needs to be secured.

OpenWeb wanted a data security solution that would be able to accurately discover sensitive data anywhere—regardless of where it came from or what it is. With tailored algorithms and a proprietary AI engine, MIND was able to easily classify and categorize OpenWeb’s vast amount of unstructured data. This allows OpenWeb to mitigate the risk of data leaks to protect their business, customers and users.

The dramatic enhancements with classification and categorization led to an immediate reduction of alerts—most of which had previously been false positives. “I like to think that our employees are savvy and well-aware,” says Yaron Blachman, CISO of OpenWeb. “We really don’t see a lot of alerts anymore. That’s a good thing for us. And now that we can trust the alerts, that creates a lot of value.”

MIND was providing value for OpenWeb almost immediately. They initially deployed MIND across cloud storage, emails and Slack. Setup took about 30 minutes and the company was seeing findings and results within 24 hours. "Slack is where we get most of our knowledge," Blachman notes. "MIND’s ability to handle sensitive data discovery was clear from the start."

“It was almost completely frictionless,” adds Blachman. “It’s a modern dashboard, I understand it immediately and I see it working. For us, MIND is the next-generation DLP.” Since deploying MIND, OpenWeb has seen a significant reduction in time spent remediating and a sharp drop in false positives. “Our job as security people is to reduce the risk within the company. With MIND, we know the risk is actually reduced,” says Blachman. Now finally—for the first time—OpenWeb has confidence that their DLP program built on MIND is actually working.