Inventory, Map or Label? — TechKnowSurge

About this interactive

Having a classification scheme is not enough; the Data Inventory and Data Labeling lesson is about applying it. Data inventory comes first: scouring the organization's data sources to find out where data is and how it should be classified. In the lesson, that meant searching a relational database for customer data and PII. Data mapping is often needed along the way. In a relational database, tables are linked to each other. To find everywhere one customer's data is stored, you take a record and trace it through those relationships into the other tables. Data labeling is the last step: marking the data with its classification so it can be tracked. For a document, that can be a file attribute or metadata (data about data). For a database, the lesson has used the description field. A separate spreadsheet or database that records each item's class works too. A quick test for each card: is the task finding where data lives, following one record's links, or writing down a class?

What you'll learn

Place a task in the step of applying classification it belongs to: data inventory, data mapping or data labeling
Tell finding where data is kept (inventory) from tracing one record through linked tables (mapping), and both from marking data with its class (labeling)

Aligned to

CompTIA Security+

4.2 Explain the security implications of proper hardware, software, and data asset management.

5.4 Summarize elements of effective security compliance.

NIST CSF

ID.AM-07 Inventories of data and corresponding metadata for designated data types are maintained.

NIST NICE

K0934 Knowledge of data classification policies and procedures

Key terms

Data Inventory: A structured catalog of the data an organization collects and stores, used to support compliance, access management, and deletion requests.
Data Mapping: The process of tracing relationships between data across systems or database tables to identify where specific data is stored.
Data Classification: The process of organizing and labeling data based on its sensitivity or confidentiality level to inform access and handling policies.
Metadata: Data that describes other data — such as a file's name, size, creation date, and author — allowing operating systems and applications to organize, index, and manage content without reading the content itself.

Topics

Data Classification Data Inventory Interactive Categorize

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