Steve Years | Product Marketing, Data Protection
The world is producing data at an exponential rate. With generative AI driving 90% of all newly created content, organizations are overwhelmed by an ever-growing data estate. More than 181 zettabytes of data now exist globally—and 80% of it is unstructured. This includes emails, documents, chat transcripts, videos, and collaborative content across platforms like SharePoint, OneDrive, and Slack.
Unlike structured data housed in databases, unstructured data is scattered, unsupervised, and inherently vulnerable. It often contains the most sensitive information—contracts, financial records, IP, or personal data—yet is the least governed. For organizations bound by regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and CCPA, this lack of visibility introduces serious compliance risks, insider threat exposure, and audit challenges.
Thales has long been the global leader in structured data protection, offering database activity monitoring, data discovery, and data classification. But in today’s environment, the distinction between structured and unstructured data no longer excuses blind spots.
That’s why Thales is introducing File Activity Monitoring (FAM): a new, strategic capability built to bring enterprise-grade visibility, control, and intelligence to unstructured data. It represents the next evolution in data-centric security—closing the gap between risk and response—turning unstructured data from a hidden liability into a measurable, manageable asset.
Thales FAM offers the most comprehensive unstructured data protection suite on the market, empowering security and compliance teams to:
1. Discover and Classify Sensitive Data at Scale
Using both agent-based and agentless methods, FAM scans across servers, file shares, cloud services, and collaboration platforms. It classifies data against regulatory and business requirements—like PII, PHI, financial records, and IP—and continuously updates classifications to account for change over time.
2. Monitor Every Access and Detect Anomalies in Real-Time
FAM logs and analyzes every interaction with unstructured files—whether read, modified, copied, or shared. The centralized dashboard offers deep insights into audit trends, coverage gaps, and access patterns across geographic regions and data sources, including unmanaged locations.
3. Simplify Compliance with Audit-Ready Reports
Generate reports tailored to GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and other frameworks in minutes—not hours. FAM enriches audit trails with data classification context and retains logs across years of access activity, enabling instant response to auditor requests or investigations.
4. Enhance Security Operations with Generative AI
The FAM Generative AI Data Security Assistant leverages Large Language Models to analyze audit data, flag policy violations, generate dashboards, and streamline compliance workflows. This AI-driven assistant helps teams move from reactive to proactive, enabling faster decision-making with less manual effort.
5. Unify Data Security Across All Sources
From Amazon S3 and Azure Blob to Gmail, SharePoint, and Windows file shares—FAM extends visibility into all corners of the data estate. Whether managed or unmanaged, on-prem or in the cloud, the solution integrates with the Thales Data Security Fabric for end-to-end control.
In today’s data-driven enterprise, visibility is control. Thales File Activity Monitoring gives CISOs, CIOs, and data security leaders the intelligence they need to protect what matters—wherever it lives. By unifying structured and unstructured data monitoring, organizations reduce operational risk, improve regulatory posture, and reclaim control over the most complex, overlooked segment of their data estate.
The era of unstructured data darkness is over. With Thales, unstructured data becomes not just secured—but a strategic asset.