How WalkMe digital adoption platform protects its sensitive data

Countless organizations have been racing to the cloud to speed up innovation, improve data-driven decisions, and make data available to the entire organization (aka data democratization). 

WalkMe, a digital adoption platform, was no exception. Their product enables customers to monitor their internal software usage, track their digital transformation efforts, and manage change with tools for onboarding, training, and adoption initiatives. The WalkMe platform operates in the cloud, and its data is accessible to personnel across the company. 

But because it monitors and optimizes customers’ internal operations, the platform regularly interacts with sensitive customer data. The WalkMe team wanted to establish controls for protecting this sensitive data but simply couldn’t keep up with the rapid pace of change in the cloud. As they tried to secure their cloud data, they encountered a few challenges — challenges common to any organization working to protect its cloud data.

Challenge #1: data proliferation

Most organizations turn to the cloud to speed up their operations. But as cloud transformation continues, they soon realize that cloud innovation is outpacing their existing data security controls.

This primarily happens because of data proliferation: fast-paced growth due to data democratization in the cloud. Because virtually anyone within an organization can copy, move, or alter data within seconds, sensitive data quickly crop up in hidden pockets across the business. Here at Laminar, we call this shadow data: unknown data left not managed or kept up-to-date by the IT and security teams. 

The WalkMe team saw the risk of leaving shadow data unaddressed. They needed to locate any unprotected or underprotected sensitive customer data, even on assets they hadn’t previously known about, then clean it up or move it to safer locations. But because of the constant movement within the cloud, it was a massive challenge. 

Challenge #2: a complex cloud environment

In addition to the constant movement and proliferation of data, many organizations struggle with a complex cloud environment. The daily copying, moving, and changing of data doesn’t just happen within a single cloud environment; it happens across a complex, multi-cloud environment. And the data itself can be structured, unstructured, and semi-structured, stored within many different environment-specific forms. 

WalkMe also faced this challenge as they sought to protect sensitive customer data across their AWS, Azure and GCP data stores. Plus, each of these CSPs creates a few different file types. For instance, their AWS ecosystem alone stores data within S3 buckets, RDS, and EBS.

Challenge #3: ineffective legacy solutions

While many organizations have some type of data security tools or practices, these solutions often don’t cut it in a complex cloud environment. Most legacy solutions aim to protect data stored within an on-prem environment with clear perimeters and slow-paced data movement. Now, data movement that used to take days or weeks to complete can happen in minutes, and traditional perimeters no longer exist because of data democratization. Some other data security tools may be purpose-built for the cloud, but only offer limited support across one cloud service provider, or require connectors to known assets for discovery, which are difficult to configure and completely miss any and all shadow data.  

The WalkMe team felt this pain while attempting to secure their cloud data with a slow, legacy solution. Instead of enabling cloud innovation, this legacy platform slowed them down with bottlenecks and frustrations. 

How Laminar helps organizations like WalkMe

The WalkMe team needed a better way to protect their sensitive data. So, they turned to Laminar’s data security posture management (DSPM) solution. Since implementing Laminar’s DSPM, the WalkMe team has seen the following results:

• Complete data security coverage for their multi-cloud environment, both in depth and breadth.
• End-to-end visibility of all data (both known and unknown) with Laminar’s data discovery and classification capabilities.
• Quick data security wins, such as successfully encrypting all sensitive data and preventing overexposure.
• Increased collaboration with their DevOps team to make actionable changes.  

Check out the full case study to dive deeper into WalkMe and Laminar’s partnership.