Qohash
Faster, Simpler, Cheaper Sensitive Data Compliance and Insider Threat Prevention

Along with its numerous benefits, remote working–now omnipresent across many industries–has opened the door to many novel data security risks for enterprises.

Remote employees use their smartphones and laptops to access company data, compelling businesses to apply appropriate security measures to maintain data integrity and prevent personal devices from becoming vulnerable endpoints for security breaches. Companies attempting to comply with stringent data privacy laws must make additional efforts to find, classify, protect – and when necessary, delete – data across every location.

As the global corporate world has transcended from a ‘safe harbor regime’ to a ‘fully regulated era,’ appropriate adherence to regulatory compliance and data security protocols can be the difference between a thriving business, and one that’s subject to both major non-compliance fines and reputational damage.

Having spent most of his career in defense and cybersecurity, former Department of National Defense officer, Jean Le Bouthillier, observed many organizations struggling with data security and regulatory challenges. He envisioned developing a solution that supported hybrid work environments and delivered the performance necessary to securely manage extensive quantities of data.

To achieve that, and help enterprises across industries thwart ever-rising security breaches and navigate dynamic regulatory scenarios, Le Bouthillier founded enterprise data security startup Qohash in 2018. Qohash empowers businesses to meet compliance requirements, and identify internal threats – before they turn into a data breach.

“Qohash was created to address the biggest complaints about legacy tools: major blindspots at endpoints and a massive amount of maintenance required to support the technology. QOSTODIAN scans all files, across all environments, while offering predictable pricing, with no on-premises servers required,” says Le Bouthillier.

Enhanced Data Visibility, Control, and Adherence to Regulatory Compliance

Since its inception, Qohash has developed innovative data security and privacy solutions that make it easier for businesses to find, inventory, and monitor their sensitive data, while understanding the associated risks and taking precise and expedited actions. The company assisted numerous institutions in the financial sector – an industry where consumer data safety is the foundation for all processes.

Qohash’s objective is to remain vigilant in changing market landscapes and develop data protection solutions that offer a shorter time-to-value when compared with traditional data security products. With its seasoned data security experts, Qohash has developed the QOSTODIAN platform, it’s an easy and quick-to-deploy sensitive data risk management platform that generates insights into the diverse aspects of data.

QOSTODIAN brings the two most essential elements of data privacy — the creation of a data inventory and insider threat monitoring — under one umbrella, in the form of an integrated sensitive data risk management platform.

The platform automates related processes and allows stakeholders to focus their energy and resources on high-level data stewardship and ownership strategies.

Qohash’s proprietary data security technology and architecture allow its platform to track individual data elements being shared within the various departments of an organization and alert authorities regarding high-risk behaviors in real-time. Unlike legacy data security platforms, QOSTODIAN, owing to its tracking capability, traces the specific data and contextual elements of each file, saving data and security analysts from manually checking each file for discrepancies and providing them with highly dependable insights.

“Qohash was created to address the biggest complaints about legacy tools: major blindspots at endpoints and a massive amount of maintenance required to support the technology”

The platform’s reverse search functionality simplifies the analysis process further, allowing analysts to input sensitive data and generate reports regarding the storage, propagation, and integrity of data within an organization.

Businesses that are getting started on their data security and privacy journey can utilize QOSTODIAN to create sensitive data inventories across shared repositories. The platform scans cloud-based tools like OneDrive, G Suite, Box, and S3, along with on-premise networks and servers. It automatically identifies and classifies sensitive data elements up to 60 times faster than conventional alternatives, scanning every file type regardless of location.

“The reports generated by QOSTODIAN are accurate and reliable and hold true in external and internal audits,” says Le Bouthillier. “Qostodian enables the foundational step in compliance: discovering and inventorying sensitive data. Companies see all data in their possession and who has access to it. In line with compliance, they can produce access control lists, meet “right to forget” requests, and provide evidence of policy enforcement.”

Businesses can use the platform to review their processes and policies and ensure they do not involve risky or non-compliant elements. Since various sensitive data are subject to different levels of risk, QOSTODIAN ranks and contextualizes risks, simplifying analysis so security teams can ignore the noise and focus on real potential threats.

Enterprises looking to gain more visibility into their customer data, monitor sensitive information continuously, and detect risky employee behavior can deploy QOSTODIAN PRIME.

With its proactive and intelligent threat detection capability, QOSTODIAN identifies sensitive data elements on employee workstations, registers specific data elements, and tracks personnel interactions with them. The platform then notifies security managers of real-time risky and non-compliant employee behavior. This proactive visibility empowers management to investigate non-compliant employee practices and avert security breaches before they occur. For closer monitoring, security analysts can analyze the risk factor of each department and its transformation over a period of time while also tagging specific employees deemed risky to their intelligence dashboard.

In case of an unforeseen data breach, QOSTODIAN eliminates the manual audit work and enables its clients to streamline the notification process by identifying involved customers and supervisory authorities and informing them within 36 to 72 hours. These feature sets are invaluable for CISOs, CIOs, and security executives, allowing them to generate on-demand risk and policy violation reports.

“Our vision is to protect the world’s most sensitive data and create a safer future for everyone. We always prioritize what matters the most to achieve that,” says Le Bouthillier.

Bearing in mind that data security management teams are often burdened with many critical responsibilities, Qohash has geared its platform towards user-friendliness, allowing its clients to deploy the platform with minimal effort, as opposed to spending a great deal of time deploying, integrating, and configuring solutions.

Our vision is to protect the world’s most sensitive data and create a safer future for everyone.

Qohash’s experts first deploy the platform in their clients’ existing IT infrastructure, followed by the data discovery and scanning phase. The platform detects anomalies, policy deviations, and risky scenarios within an organization. QOSTODIAN suggests reducing risks associated with buying new technologies, training new personnel, and changing policies.

Mitigating Internal Security Threats

Qohash empowered numerous enterprises to jettison legacy solutions and embrace its advanced data security platform, one of them being the Desjardins Group, North America’s largest credit union and the world’s fifth largest cooperative financial group.

Over the last four years, Desjardins heavily invested in digitizing its product portfolio and ramped up security strategies to safeguard sensitive consumer data across various technology partners and platforms. However, the company’s security software focused mainly on files and made it costly to proactively surveil insider threats. Without Qohash, security teams performed many manual tasks and worked backward to determine the flow of information among employees.

To simplify and augment internal surveillance procedures and expedite threat investigations, Desjardins partnered with Qohash, which implemented QOSTODIAN, allowing Desjardins’ security analysts to search for distinct data elements and visualize risk more effectively.

PRIME tracks all data elements, providing contextual macro-level insights, and enabling teams to react promptly to threat scenarios. Reports also provide management with a holistic view of their data security stature and allow them to monitor at-risk employees.

By prioritizing the most malicious threats, QOSTODIAN fundamentally empowers organizations to enrich the productivity of their data security teams and the efficiency of associated processes.

The company strives to expand and consolidate its footprint in the U.S. and Europe and deepen its partnership with other industry giants. To help organizations without in-house security teams, Qohash is expanding its product portfolio to include a fully managed, turnkey data security solution. Qohash’s strategic, fully managed launch partners will be announced in November 2022.

With the vision to become a ubiquitous data security company trusted by leading organizations worldwide to protect their most valuable assets, Qohash is empowering businesses to improve their data custodianship while steering hybrid work environments and regulatory landscapes.