Case Study: Multibillion-Dollar Global Financial Services Firm preserves open access while securing confidential M&A data with Digital Guardian

Data Protection, Open Access, and Business Enablement

Multibillion-Dollar Global Financial Services Firm, a global bank with over 200,000 employees, faced a critical challenge: preserve its culture of open access while protecting highly sensitive M&A data, meet regulatory requirements after failing an SEC audit, and prevent privileged administrators from viewing or exfiltrating deal-specific files. To solve this, the firm engaged Digital Guardian and deployed its Context-based Data Awareness data classification and protection capabilities.

Digital Guardian automatically classified and tagged all Investment Banking file-share data, decoupling access rights from device-level permissions and enforcing policies that prevent even privileged users from opening, copying, or moving confidential files. Deployed in Monitor mode, Digital Guardian provided forensics-quality logging and real-time alerts to the incident response team, preserved workflow for users, and ensured tags persist through reuse or file derivation. The result: the firm maintained open access while tightening control over critical data, increased productivity, addressed SEC audit shortcomings, enabled privileged admins to perform maintenance without risking data exposure, and expanded the solution to additional business units.