Data Discovery for GDPR: A Quick Guide

Ahhhhh, GDPR. Security teams despise it, privacy-aware internet users adore it, and the rest of the world has never heard of it. In case you need a refresher, the GDPR is a wee 88-page tome of guidelines that regulate how companies collect, process, store, and share any personal data that originates in the EU. Love it or hate it, GDPR isn’t going away anytime soon. It’s better to learn how to comply with it than to be forced to delete data or catch a steep fine, as Tiktok did for a cool half billion euros earlier this year.

To ensure the privacy and security of personal data, organizations first need to know where this data is located. As many security teams can attest, this can be surprisingly difficult. Today, with the rise of AI apps and LLMs, as well as the increasing popularity of lakehouse architecture, companies have more data stores, more users, and more projects than before, which often means messier and more complex environments. This blog post explores the importance of data discovery for meeting GDPR compliance and how Satori helps organizations navigate this complex landscape.

The GDPR is a comprehensive data privacy and protection regulation implemented by the European Union (EU) in 2018. It is designed to enhance and unify data privacy rights and protections for individuals within the EU while also addressing the export of personal data outside the EU. 

The GDPR has far-reaching implications for businesses and organizations that collect, process, store, or handle personal data of EU residents. The following are some of the main aspects of GDPR.

The GDPR applies not only to organizations located within the EU but also to organizations located outside the EU that offer goods or services to, or monitor the behavior of, EU residents. The GDPR encourages organizations to collect and process only the data necessary for a specific purpose. In order to comply with GDPR, it’s important to identify the relevant data.

The GDPR emphasizes the importance of obtaining clear and informed consent from individuals to process their personal data. Consent must be freely given, specific, informed, and easily revocable. Data discovery aids in understanding where and how personal data is stored and processed to facilitate obtaining informed consent.

The GDPR grants individuals the right to access their data, rectify inaccuracies, erase data (the “right to be forgotten”), restrict processing, data portability, and object to certain types of data processing. Organizations need to be able to locate and access PII when individuals exercise their rights under GDPR, such as the right to access or erasure.

Organizations must report data breaches to relevant authorities and affected individuals within 72 hours of discovering the breach under certain circumstances. Effective data discovery and activity monitoring helps in the early detection of data breaches, enabling organizations to report breaches within GDPR’s mandated timeframes.

Organizations must demonstrate compliance with GDPR principles and be transparent about their data processing activities. Organizations that demonstrate how they collect, process, and use personal data, facilitate transparency and adhere to the GDPR’s accountability principle.

Non-compliance with GDPR can result in substantial fines, with penalties proportional to the severity of the violation. Data discovery can identify vulnerabilities and risks associated with PII processing. This insight allows organizations to implement necessary security measures to protect data as GDPR requires.

The best way to comply with GDPR is to start by securing your sensitive data for security’s sake, and then fill in the GDPR-specific gaps. Data security always starts with sensitive data discovery – you can’t secure what you don’t know exists.

Locating sensitive data across various databases, data warehouses, and data lakes can be quite complicated, especially if done manually. With Satori, it’s much simpler.

The first step to getting onboarded with Satori is connecting your cloud accounts and production data stores. Satori then scans your data stores to find and classify sensitive data, as well as any misconfigurations and security risks. 

Satori automatically classifies sensitive data with a list of out-of-the-box classifiers. This applies to PII data across a wide variety of data stores and data formats, including semi-structured JSON and structured data. Any newly discovered sensitive data is automatically added to Satori’s data inventory, so that it’s consistently up to date with the locations of all PII. 

Satori’s dashboard shows your data stores, classifications, and security alerts.

Satori also enables organizations to create their own custom classification taxonomy. Organizations with institution-specific or localized data types that may not be automatically identified as sensitive PII are defined and continuously discovered. 

Having sensitive data mapped dynamically improves efficiency, reduces risk exposure, and makes it easier to meet GDPR Article 25 (“Data protection by design and by default”).

Learn more about Satori’s data discovery and classification features.

Now, let’s get to the meat of GDPR – Article 32, or “Security of processing”.This section deals with the actual security of any personal data that’s stored. In short, sensitive data needs to be adequately encrypted, pseudonymized/masked, and under some sort of access control.

This is where a data security platform like Satori is especially helpful. Satori’s data access manager enables security engineers or data stewards to set row-level security, RBAC, ABAC, self-service and just-in-time access policies on as many of your data stores as necessary, from a single platform. Once policies are set, they are automatically applied to new or updated data stores, minimizing manual overhead. When data users or DBAs need to access data, they can request temporary access via their data portal, or through integrations like Slack. 

The data portal shows users all the data stores they do and don’t have access to.

Read more about Satori’s centralized access control. 

To meet GDPR Articles 5 and 32, organizations need continuous visibility into data access and usage. Satori complements data discovery with modern Database Activity Monitoring (DAM) to track and control personal data in real time.

• Agentless monitoring captures every query via proxy, avoiding database agents or native logs.
• Real-time policy enforcement blocks, redacts, or masks sensitive data before it leaves the source.
• Universal Data Permissions Scanner (UDPS) reveals over‑privilege by scanning effective and potential permissions.

Satori consolidates access activity, permission data, and context (user, role, query, sensitivity) into one audit trail. Logs are immutable, filterable, and exportable to SIEMs for automated response and reporting.

Read more about Satori’s data activity monitoring capabilities in our DAM Solution Overview.

GDPR compliance can be confusing, especially for large companies with complex data environments. But it doesn’t have to be hard; our customers can attest to that.

To learn how Satori can help your organization with data discovery and GDPR compliance, book a demo with our team.