Who Accessed What and When: The Power of a PII Catalog

The log showed a name, a timestamp, and the exact field they touched. The PII catalog did not lie. It told you who accessed what and when—every query, every row, every byte that left the table.

A PII catalog is the map to your most sensitive data. It tracks personal identifiers like names, emails, addresses, phone numbers, and IDs. But the value is not just in knowing what you store—it’s knowing who looked at it, and when. Without this, there is no real audit, and no proof when someone crosses the line.

Strong governance starts with real-time, immutable records. Every read operation on PII gets logged. Every access event links to a user identity, a system token, or an API key. You see full context: query text, source IP, service account, destination system. You can sort by most accessed fields, see first access times, and detect access outside normal hours.

The “who accessed what and when” capability turns compliance from guesswork into certainty. Regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA require this. Security teams demand it to close insider threat gaps. Incident responders rely on it to reconstruct exact timelines. A true PII catalog pulls metadata from structured and unstructured data sources, normalizes it, and stores it in a secure, queryable store.

PII catalogs work best when they integrate with your data warehouse, lake, and streaming systems. They need automated classification to keep up with schema changes. They must enforce role-based access so only authorized users can see sensitive records. And they should trigger alerts when unusual access patterns occur.

Without a precise record of who touched which PII fields and when, any breach investigation is incomplete. With it, you control the narrative and can prove compliance on demand.

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