How to ensure safety of personal data during process discovery

Today businesses care about their customer’s data privacy more than ever before. With the strengthening of laws like GDPR that imposes heavy fines on data breaches, businesses are extremely careful on how they collect and process personally identifiable information (PII) like, but not limited to, names, addresses, departments, and user IDs.

In industries like insurance and healthcare, sensitive and highly confidential information is associated with PII. So, when we talk about the benefits of process discovery, one of the most common concerns we hear is: “Will process discovery expose or compromise our customer’s personal information?”

At SurfaceAI, we take data privacy very seriously. And that is why we have designed our solution to meet all your security requirements while prioritizing the prevention of data breaches and the loss of confidential data – be it that of the customer, employee, or corporate.

Can process discovery and data protection co-exist?

Absolutely, yes!

Process discovery is all about finding, analyzing, mapping, and documenting existing business processes in real-time. This involves capturing metadata and screenshots of applications employees use every day. Metadata and screenshots contain direct or indirect personally identifiable information such as protected health events and sensitive know your customer (KYC) information.

SurfaceAI supports de-identification of PII to safeguard privacy rights in three ways:

  1. Restrict applications that are scanned: Businesses can filter applications or parts of the processes they do not wish to capture or don’t contribute to improving the overall process. In case the data can’t be filtered, users can delete the information before sending it to external business analysts. 
  2. Anonymization: Businesses can choose to permanently remove any personal identifiers like social security numbers, passport numbers, and addresses. SurfaceAI gives you the flexibility to determine which data sets are sensitive and need to be anonymized to prevent re-identification. Users can mask selective screens or fields to protect confidential information.
  3. Pseudonymization: Businesses can encrypt personally identifiable information to ensure users can’t correlate it to real information. Users will not be able to attribute the data accurately without additional information. For instance, if you don’t want business analysts to see names of employees performing risk management processes, you can easily replace the names with a pseudonym like resource-1 and you can choose with whom you’d like to share this information.

Gain insights into your business processes, safely

The goal of process discovery is to uncover new insights while protecting data privacy. Automated process discovery strictly protects confidential and sensitive data by providing privacy-enhancing methodologies and best practices. SurfaceAI allows businesses to analyze “as-is” processes without breaching user information or customer data. The depth of discovery that is needed to improve a process can be adjusted to protect customer data. Even when sensitive data is collected under unavoidable circumstances, organizations have complete control of the captured data complying to the enterprise infrastructure governance framework as the data resides within their machine/network. Our fair and transparent process discovery approach ensures that the data collected will be processed only for the intended purposes and comply with the organization’s infrastructure policy. If you like to explore secure process discovery for your business, talk to our experts today.