Data Classification

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Included in this chapter:

Dimension	Classification policy	Data mapping	Data labeling
What it produces	The categories and the criteria for each	An inventory tying each data type to its locations and flows	A tag physically bound to each object
The question it answers	What classes exist and how to decide one	Where does each class live and where does it move	What class is this specific object
Driven by	Regulation, contracts, and business impact of disclosure	Discovery output plus jurisdiction and residency rules	The policy criteria applied to real content
Who/what acts	Data owners and governance set it once	Security and data teams maintain the map	Users, admins, or automated tools per object
Downstream consumer	Everything below depends on it	Retention, residency, and risk reporting	IRM, DLP, access control, and retention enforcement

Cheat sheet

Classification runs policy, then mapping, then labeling
Discovery finds the data; classification decides what it is
Classify by impact of disclosure, not by where the data is stored
The data owner sets the class; the custodian enforces the controls
Keep the scheme to three or four clearly-triggered tiers
Regulation, contract, and business impact each force a class, and the highest wins
Mixed data takes the highest class present, not the average
Derived data inherits the source class until it is provably de-identified
Data mapping ties each class to its locations and cross-border flows
In the cloud, mapping must include provider regions and sub-processors
Labels reach objects three ways: user, administrator, and automated
A label only protects data if it is persistently bound to the object
The label is the hand-off to IRM, DLP, access control, and retention
Cloud object tags and resource labels are the key controls match against
Automated classification scales to unstructured data that humans cannot label by hand
Use a standardized classification schema with consistent key-value tags for accurate reporting
Classification labels go stale, so build periodic review into operations

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Cheat sheet