Case Study: $35B+ Financial Institution Secures PII in AWS with PKWARE

Securing PII Data $35B+ Financial Institution Transformed Their Cloud Data Security Strategy

A $35B+ Financial Institution needed a better way to identify sensitive information in compressed parquet files flowing into AWS S3 buckets, remediate false positives, and mask real PII while preserving the original data format. The customer also wanted a fully automated workflow that could handle new data feeds as they arrived. PKWARE and its PK Protect platform were brought in to address these cloud data security challenges.

PKWARE implemented PK Protect in the bank’s AWS environment, using a custom policy, EMR Cluster-based MR jobs for large-scale discovery, an automated remediation utility, and S3 Orchestrator to split scanning and masking tasks by folder size. As a result, the institution gained an automated process to read new feeds from DynamoDB tables and mask sensitive data, along with reports after each run showing how many files were submitted and successfully masked. PKWARE enabled faster, more consistent scanning and masking of sensitive data across the bank’s AWS environments.