PK Discovery
Find every piece of sensitive data. Know exactly where it lives.
PKware PK Discovery provides comprehensive, automated discovery and classification of sensitive data across your entire infrastructure — structured and unstructured, on-premises and cloud, databases and file shares — giving organisations the complete data intelligence they need to understand, protect, and govern their most critical information assets.
Enterprise
Grade Security
Product Overview
PK Discovery
Organisations cannot protect data they do not know they have. Yet across the typical African enterprise, sensitive data is scattered across an astonishing array of systems: ERP databases, legacy file servers, SharePoint libraries, cloud storage buckets, email archives, backup tapes, and the personal drives of employees who copied files for convenience years ago and never moved them back. This shadow data estate is the primary reason that data breaches expose more information than anticipated, why POPIA compliance programmes fail their initial assessments, and why organisations struggle to respond to data subject access requests with confidence. PK Discovery was built to solve the data visibility problem at its root.
PK Discovery deploys lightweight discovery agents and agentless connectors across your infrastructure, scanning hundreds of file formats and data sources with deep content inspection — not just metadata analysis. It recognises over 300 types of sensitive data by pattern, context, and format: personal identity numbers, financial account data, health records, intellectual property markers, and any custom data patterns specific to your organisation or regulatory environment. Discovered data is classified, tagged, and presented in a rich dashboard showing where sensitive data resides, in what volumes, whether it is adequately protected, and how its distribution has changed over time.
For POPIA compliance programmes, PK Discovery provides the data mapping and processing record capabilities that regulators require, with automated generation of data inventories and processing purpose documentation. For breach response, the platform provides the precise data location intelligence needed to assess the scope of an incident within hours rather than weeks. And for ongoing data governance, it provides the continuous monitoring capability to detect when sensitive data appears in unexpected locations — an employee copying customer records to a personal cloud storage account, a development database containing unmasked production data — before those anomalies become reportable incidents.
Key Benefits
- 01
Achieve complete visibility across your sensitive data estate — discovering data in systems and locations your team did not know existed, eliminating dangerous blind spots.
- 02
Accelerate POPIA compliance by up to 60% with automated data mapping, processing record generation, and regulatory gap analysis based on actual discovered data.
- 03
Reduce data breach impact by knowing exactly what data is where before an incident occurs — enabling faster scope assessment and more accurate regulatory notification.
Core Capabilities
What PK Discovery Does
Enterprise-Wide Data Scanning
Scan structured databases, unstructured file shares, cloud storage, email archives, and endpoints for sensitive data with deep content inspection across 300+ data types.
Intelligent Data Classification
Automatically classify discovered data by sensitivity level, regulatory category, and business context using pattern matching, machine learning, and contextual analysis.
Interactive Data Maps
Visualise where sensitive data lives across your estate with interactive topology maps showing data volumes, risk concentrations, and protection gaps by system and location.
POPIA & Regulatory Mapping
Map discovered data to POPIA, GDPR, PCI-DSS, and HIPAA requirements, automatically generating data processing records and compliance gap assessments.
Anomaly & Data Movement Alerts
Detect when sensitive data appears in unexpected locations, is moved to unsecured systems, or accumulates in volumes inconsistent with business purpose — alerting in real time.
Remediation Integration
Trigger encryption, classification, access restriction, or deletion workflows directly from discovery findings — linking discovery to action in a single unified workflow.
Real-World Applications
Industry Use Cases
See how organisations across sectors are deploying PK Discovery to solve their most critical security challenges.
Financial Services
A bank uses PK Discovery as the first phase of its POPIA compliance programme, discovering 2.4 million personally identifiable records scattered across 12 legacy systems and 340 unstructured file shares — providing the data map needed to prioritise remediation.
Healthcare
A hospital group scans its entire infrastructure during a data governance initiative, discovering patient records in development databases, test environments, and archival backup repositories that were unknown to the data protection officer.
Retail & Consumer
A retailer preparing for PCI-DSS assessment uses PK Discovery to locate all stored cardholder data, discovering historical transaction records in legacy flat files that had been retained well beyond the required retention period and had never been identified in previous audits.
Legal & Professional Services
A law firm uses PK Discovery to respond to a regulatory data subject access request, scanning its entire document management system and email archive to locate all data relating to a specific individual within the legally mandated response window.
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PK Discovery?
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