Nira enables findhelp to safeguard sensitive data through proactive risk management

Findhelp partners with care management and electronic health record systems to integrate social care and make it easy to refer people to local resources and programs. 

As a company that deals with personal health information (PHI) and personally identifiable information (PII), findhelp needed to safeguard its extremely valuable customer information. 

Findhelp wanted to ensure documents were protected in its Google Drive and needed a better way to monitor all information entering and leaving its company environment, according to IT Manager Ricky Dunn. 

But Ricky and the team faced a major issue. The solutions they were using to protect company data didn’t give them enough of the right information to be preventative, instead wasting their time with a massive number of alerts and false positives. The team needed a solution that would let them be proactive and see real risks in their Google Drive environment. 

Ricky started looking into other solutions because it was essential to plan ahead and avoid an incident. 

“If we have an issue, it doesn’t matter who made the mistake, all that matters is that the mistake was made. You’re having to face headlines or reactively reach out to vendors and contractors,” Ricky said. 

Findhelp wanted to stay prepared in order to safeguard customer trust and keep critical data secure. So, Ricky and the team turned to Nira. He appreciated how easy Nira’s tool was to navigate and how quickly he could gain comprehensive visibility into potential risks. 

“One thing I really liked about Nira is how easy the portal was for us to jump into—to really start seeing what was going on,” Ricky said.

Proactive monitoring, without false positives

Nira allows findhelp to view and protect all data being shared externally

Before Nira, findhelp had custom data loss prevention (DLP) rules set up. The DLP solution would generate alerts that the team would review, but it was always a pain, according to Ricky. 

“We’re a small IT team. We honestly have better things to do than sift through the hundreds of DLP alerts and false positives that come through each day,” Ricky explained.

The process was fatiguing, time-consuming, and didn’t give the team the information they truly needed. Ricky and the team needed to monitor all customer and company information entering and leaving their company Drive. They wanted to ensure that sensitive information that should be private, stayed that way.

With our DLP solution, every quarter we would get an email with a report that was all false positives. Nira is excellent because we no longer have to worry about those emails. It makes it easy to monitor items that may be sensitive.

Ricky Dunn,

IT Manager

A significant risk Ricky identified with Nira was how many company documents were shared with personal email accounts. 

The problem with personal email accounts is they are naturally risky. They’re designed for personal use, without any corporate oversight, and often with zero-to-minimal security practices and procedures. Ricky needed to find and restrict personal account access but didn’t want to block all Gmail account sharing. 

“It’s hard to say let’s block sharing to all Gmail accounts because there are valid businesses out there using Gmail,” Ricky said. 

Nira was powerful because we could monitor and remove unnecessary personal account access without blocking everything.

Ricky Dunn,

IT Manager

With Nira, findhelp could have complete visibility of risks and the ability to monitor them without wasting time on false positives and ineffective alerts.  

Secure, compliant offboarding 

Nira gives findhelp the right tools to transfer ownership, offboard contractors, and maintain compliance

One of findhelp’s biggest use cases is offboarding; the team uses Nira to transfer ownership when employees leave the company and when offboarding vendors. 

Before Nira, if a departing employee was searching for a document, Ricky and the team might sift through 60 gigs of Google Drive documents, hoping to find the right file. Now, they can easily transfer ownership of all documents or a selection of documents belonging to departing employees to their managers—in just a few clicks. This process has greatly strengthened and streamlined offboarding for the team. 

Instead of offboarding being a hurdle or roadblock, we're able to coordinate directly with those involved and make life easier for everybody.

Ricky Dunn,

IT Manager

Secure offboarding practices are extremely important for compliance requirements, especially when it comes to HITRUST audits, according to Ricky. 

He explained that for some controls required by HITRUST, their company policy deals specifically with what happens to data owned by ex-employees and contractors. 

“We share all these documents with contractors under their business email addresses,” Ricky said. “At some point, that contract ends. Who thinks to pull all those documents back into our environment?”

With the data they get from Nira, Ricky and the team can create an offboarding checklist to see what documents are owned by an external contractor account with an expiring contract. They can then reach out to the contractor with the names and direct links of documents that they need to be transferred back to findhelp as part of contractor and vendor offboarding. Prior to using Nira, Ricky and the team had no administrative visibility into documents that were externally owned by their contractors and vendors.

“It’s been incredibly powerful when you can show someone the documents that you need and ask if they can handle that for us, and then reclaim ownership of those files,” Ricky said. 

The process has allowed the findhelp team to stay secure and compliant with HITRUST requirements. They can make sure their information is transferred back to findhelp after the team stops working with contractors and vendors, so that no vital company data is lost. 

Automated mitigation of risk through security policies

Findhelp uses Nira to automate policies, without needing to micromanage

When using other IT and security tools, the findhelp team often spent valuable time ensuring workflows and automations were running smoothly and working as they should. A key difference with Nira, says Ricky, is the ability to automate the mitigation of risks through the tool’s policies section. 

With Nira, we clicked a button, and the automation was set up. Any time we need it, it’s there, carrying out automation tasks in the background.

Ricky Dunn,

IT Manager

Ricky and the team can turn on automated policies and know that remediation tasks are taken care of. For example, the team has automated reducing public link exposure and eliminating risk on stale documents. They can ensure personal account access is restricted and mitigate public link risk on folders, through an automated process that runs effortlessly in the background. 

This helps the team keep an eye on the monthly checklist items they monitor as part of HITRUST requirements. Automations streamline this process and allow the company to stay compliant without wasting valuable time. 

Ricky says setting up automations without the need to micromanage them is a stark contrast to other tools he’s used. 

Whenever Ricky sets up an automation in Nira, he feels confident that it’s doing its job. 

I have enough trust in Nira’s platform that I don’t feel the need to micromanage it, which is incredibly rare these days.

Ricky Dunn,

IT Manager