Data Types

Regulated Information

subject to legal or industry mandates (e.g., HIPAA for health data, PCI DSS for payment cards, GDPR for personal data). Requires prescribed controls, breach-notification processes, retention schedules, and audit trails

Trade secret

Proprietary processes, formulas, designs, customer lists or other competitive “secret sauce.” Unauthorized disclosure risks competitive harm and legal liability—so apply strict access controls, NDAs, and monitoring.

Intellectual property

Creations of the mind—patents, copyrights, trademarks, software source code. Loss or theft undermines revenue and brand value; protect with rights-management, watermarking, obfuscation, and stringent change-management.

Legal information

Contracts, litigation files, board minutes, M&A due-diligence documents. Demands chain-of-custody, version control, privileged access, and secure e-discovery to maintain authenticity and attorney–client privilege.

Financial information

Ledgers, bank statements, payroll records, forecasts, tax filings. Controls include segregation of duties, immutable logging, encryption at rest/in transit, and rigorous audit logging to meet SOX and internal requirements.

Human-readable

plaintext or formatted docs users can open directly

Non-human-readable

encrypted or binary data only machines (or key holders) parse.