When it comes to compliance with regulations, including HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS, and GLBA, how you discover sensitive data is critical. However, many data discovery tools introduce unnecessary risk. They move, copy, or store regulated data outside the environments where it already resides. As a result, the attack surface expands and data leakage becomes more likely.
Recent Vendor Environment Breaches
Vendors and business associates account for a disproportionate share of breached PII, PCI, and PHI records. Therefore vendor environments are one of the largest risk surfaces for data leakage. Recent breaches show that migrating and then storing sensitive data inside vendor environments significantly amplifies risk.
- Toyota (2024): A third-party supplier’s environment held sensitive Toyota U.S. data, including employee information, contracts, and internal credentials. Attackers breached the supplier and leaked approximately 240GB of data. Toyota’s core systems remained intact, yet the impact still landed. In short, outsourcing data storage and processing expands the attack surface even when the primary enterprise has strong internal controls.
- Change Healthcare (2024–2025): As a healthcare technology and administrative services vendor, Change Healthcare routinely stored and processed PHI for thousands of providers. Attackers exfiltrated claims and patient records aggregated within that platform, which affected roughly 193 million individuals.
- Conduent (2025): Conduent’s vendor environment centralized PHI from multiple healthcare organizations. Hackers gained prolonged unauthorized access to backend infrastructure. They then exfiltrated PHI of more than 25 million individuals.
- PowerSchool (2024–2025): PowerSchool, a student information system vendor, centralized decades of student and staff records for school districts across North America. Attackers gained unauthorized access to their backend systems and exfiltrated records dating back to the 1980s. Therefore long-term data retention within the vendor environment significantly increased the breach’s scope.
- Infosys McCamish (2024): Infosys McCamish, a financial and insurance administration services vendor, stored and processed PII for major financial institutions. A LockBit ransomware attack compromised their environment and exfiltrated customer data. Because the vendor platform was centralized, the impact reached beyond a single organization.
As a security vendor, PKWARE intentionally avoids moving, copying, or storing customer data. That avoids creating new exposure risk in the first place.
Discovery That Never Leaves Your Environment
With PKWARE, data discovery occurs entirely within the customer’s own environment. An agent-based architecture makes that possible. The platform scans and identifies sensitive data in place. It never relocates, duplicates, or transmits that data to external systems.
This is by design, and it is a core principle of PKWARE’s commitment to data security. Because discovery stays local, PKWARE eliminates the need to move sensitive data into third-party platforms. In turn, compliance complexity falls and breach risk drops materially.
No Centralized Storage of Discovered Data
PKWARE does not retain the underlying data once the system identifies it. Instead, the platform surfaces the insight and metadata that security and compliance actions require. It keeps no copies of the discovered content. Unlike vendor-hosted or centralized discovery models, our solution creates no aggregated stores of sensitive data.
This distinction matters for regulatory compliance. Any system that stores replicated sensitive data becomes an additional system of record. Therefore audit scope expands, and a compromise carries more exposure.
The breaches above show how prolonged access to stored customer data inside vendor systems dramatically increases both impact and regulatory fallout. PKWARE’s discovery model avoids those pitfalls. Data remains where it already exists, under the customer’s control, governed by existing security and compliance policies.
Preventing Data Leakage, Not Creating New Paths for It
PKWARE never requires sensitive data to leave the customer’s environment. It also does not store, relocate, or copy that data. Consequently, no external repository of sensitive data exists that a third-party breach could expose. No external organization sees or handles customer data during discovery.
This approach aligns directly with core compliance principles. It minimizes data exposure across the data lifecycle. Moreover, it prevents discovery tools from becoming unintended aggregation points for regulated data.
Secure Discovery That Enables Action
By discovering sensitive data safely and in place, PKWARE enables organizations to take informed, compliant action. They secure the data within their own environment. Organizations can encrypt, mask, redact, quarantine, or delete sensitive data. As a result, discovery becomes a foundation for protection rather than another source of exposure.
Compliance is not just about finding sensitive data. Rather, it is about finding it without creating new risk. Our agent-based, in-environment discovery delivers the visibility organizations need while keeping data secure where it lives.
PK Protect: Your Policy-Based Platform
Moving to policy-driven data protection delivers clear advantages. You meet compliance mandates, eliminate usability issues, and protect data wherever it lives or moves.
PK Protect is a policy-based platform that enables consistent data discovery and remediation. It works across the organization through centrally managed policies. Therefore you can simplify security on endpoints, servers, on-prem, cloud, databases, data lakes, applications, and even the mainframe. See how it works by requesting a demo today.