City of Sioux Falls is the largest city in South Dakota with over 182,000 citizens. With a 4% annual growth rate, the city is quickly evolving into a major metropolitan area of the Midwest. With a growing population of citizens, the city is faced with an exponentially increasing data footprint and massive data sprawl, making it harder to discover and protect sensitive employee and citizen data.

Brandon Morris, Systems Administrator, is part of a 28-person IT team supporting the city’s central services for its 1,200 employees and citizens, including managing the control center for fire, police, and rescue. “We have access to all kinds of citizen data, such as health clinic records, permits, and personally identifiable information (PII). We must ensure its privacy and confidentiality. As a result, it is critical that we implement strong and continuous data governance processes,” said Morris. “Rubrik’s Polaris Sonar furthers our data governance strategy by providing visibility into where sensitive content resides and within previously dark repositories, allowing us to minimize risk of data exposure and breaches and drive continuous compliance.”

Automating manual processes to drive productivity back to the business

In the past, sensitive data discovery and classification tasks were extremely manual and labor-intensive, requiring dedicated teams of several full-time engineers. “Prior to Rubrik, we didn’t have any tools to search for and categorize sensitive data. When we had to find documents that contained certain types of content, several employees would have to manually script queries for each keyword one at a time for each possible location. I could never run it across our entire environment as this only worked on a small data set and required us to know where we suspected sensitive content to reside. On top of that, the interface was very difficult to use,” said Morris.

“The last time we had to run through this process, it was very painful and timeconsuming, requiring 40-80 man-hours. Each search query would take about 1-2 weeks with several days to perform the scan of our applications for each keyword. We then had to manually categorize all that data into spreadsheets. The amount of manhours is too expensive,” said Morris. “With Rubrik Polaris Sonar, we can completely automate the process and search on-demand for hundreds of queries across all our file servers. Now, it takes just 1 hour to perform a search query. That means we can run data classification seamlessly in the background without dedicated teams and multiple full-time engineers, giving us massive productivity gains and freeing up employees for higher-value work.”

Global visibility to easily identify and lock down sensitive data exposure

One of the key objectives City of Sioux Falls looked at Rubrik’s Polaris Sonar was to gain more visibility and control into where sensitive content resides. With Rubrik Polaris Sonar, they were able to identify where data was overexposed, such as employees and citizens’ credit card numbers and social security numbers, and access levels were higher than expected. “Rubrik Polaris Sonar gave us visibility into data repositories we could never look at before. As a result, we were able to avoid data exposure and proactively create remediation plans to address high-risk incidents. The benefit to the business is huge. Data exposure can mean negative PR and impact to our citizens’ well-being if there is a data breach. Sonar helps us minimize the risk of data exposure while providing substantial management time savings.”