Sentra Cloud Data Security Platform

My main use case for Sentra  is agentless data discovery. Sentra  offers the ability to identify across the entire cloud estate data which is in the wrong environments, sensitive data which is unencrypted or unobscured, and then it flags it as high risk, which allows us to remediate that, either secure the data or potentially delete the data if it's no longer necessary but poses a risk if it was compromised by an attacker. It's all around finding ghost data and then remediating the risks associated with it.

It's a best practice that customer data or production data should never be in lower environments, and sensitive data as well. Sentra allows me to find situations such as that or, while we haven't found customer data as such, we found data that is in incorrect environments. For example, there's been test data in production systems that should be in the test environments. It's the flip way around as well. Sentra is good for identifying data such as that.

Something I appreciate about Sentra is it can find data across a range of different cloud services. That could be managed databases, virtual machines, containers as well, and object storage, which is great because it doesn't just look in one particular service. It looks across the entire state.

I appreciate the feature that Sentra classifies the data with the level of risk that it believes it to be. You can tune the classifiers, which is quite useful as well, because there's the possibility that Sentra misclassifies data. It does take a bit of time to train it up, but the classification is useful because then we can prioritize which remediations to go after first.

I would say it's not too difficult to tune the classifiers in Sentra. It does take a bit of time to do that because you're trying to train the tool to recognize company-specific data and data formats as well. But it's worthwhile doing it because then it lowers the false positive alerts that come through and it allows you to really find data which is in the incorrect places, or maybe the correct places but is no longer necessary, so should be deleted.

Sentra has increased the security of our cloud estate. We are audited by different organizations, so maintaining good data governance and security is very important for us. It benefits us from the security standpoint directly, but also financially, it benefits us because our customers very much care about security in our systems.

I cannot think of any improvements, really. Sentra does what it's meant to do, finding shadow data. If the data classification feature was improved ever so slightly, maybe a little bit quicker to use, that would be good, but that's the type of thing where it's never going to be perfect anyway, so there are no real improvements that I can see with Sentra, no big ones anyway.

The only area where I see potential for improvement is making it quicker to use the data classification section. Other than that, I haven't seen any areas where I'd want it to be improved.

I have used Sentra for around a year.

Sentra scales very well because it's deployed in the cloud, so it can scale very well. I understand that different clusters are needed for Sentra. We haven't run into this issue, but I understand that if the cloud estate becomes very large, you would probably have to deploy numerous of these clusters. That wouldn't be a problem as such because the infrastructure is code, we would just have to alter that in order to deploy more clusters. There are not any scalability issues, I would say.

Customer support from Sentra is very good. We've interacted with them a lot. I appreciate interacting with Sentra. They're very useful and very helpful. When we've met with them, they always have numerous individuals of different personas on, a technical account manager, an account manager, an engineer, and an architect, and that's very useful. I get different angles and different areas of expertise when I interact with them.

I would rate the customer support from Sentra as a 10 out of 10. They're very responsive whenever we send them a communication. We've been on calls with them numerous times, so they're very useful. There are no improvements I would see from that angle.

It was quite easy to integrate Sentra with my existing cloud infrastructure. We interacted with the Sentra team directly and they provided code that we could deploy. I knew that the code was best practice and also it's a standard way of deploying it because that's what they offered. They worked with us to deploy it as well. Their early support was brilliant. It was quite easy to deploy it. As you're deploying it onto a cloud, you then have the native integration.

I would say that audits could be anywhere from 10 to 20% smoother from using a tool such as this, because if data is classified properly and you're able to prove that very clearly, and also data is in the right places, deleted data has been carried out or old data, then it makes the whole process a lot quicker.

Sentra definitely helps with handling compliance requirements for my organization because data security is such an important part of audits and the numerous frameworks that we're audited on, it's very useful. Production data should only be in production environments, and Sentra helps with that. Obsolete or old data, Sentra flags that, which allows us to delete anything which no longer should exist as well. It makes it a lot easier and quicker to handle audits.

Sentra works in one regard in a standalone fashion because we don't have another tool which classifies and identifies shadow data. In terms of the wider ecosystem, we use other security tools within the cloud. We have a tool which produces short-term access tokens, so we don't have the storage of long-term static keys. This works side by side with Sentra because Sentra is looking for the data that you're choosing to store on various systems. This tool looks at the data that you've produced. It integrates into the wider workflow and looks at a slightly different angle of data governance.

Sentra's alerting and reporting functionality is easy to use and it links to the exact spot where the data is and the cloud account which it's in. The UI is very friendly to use as well. The functionality is easy to use and it is easy to action as well.

I use Sentra semi-regularly. There are various governance and information security teams in my organization that would use it as well. How much time it saves compared to manual processes is hard to judge because it would be impossible to find all the sensitive data through manual processes, whereas Sentra is able to do it autonomously. With that fact alone in mind, it saves easily over 50%, probably much higher, time than doing it manually.

I would recommend others to use Sentra. It's a great tool. It can definitely help save time and potentially cost as well by using it. If other potential customers were undergoing audits, this is especially useful because it allows companies to meet compliance standards more easily. I would rate this review a 10 out of 10.