Papaya Global Embraces a Data-Centric Approach to Enforce Data Security Policies
Overview
Papaya Global brings significant technological advancements to the traditional world of payroll. The company is the first global payroll provider to develop its own native payments platform dedicated to the complex and sensitive nuances of payroll related issues and dynamics.
Leveraging innovative data security technology forms a key element of its business and operational strategy, to continuously ensure the privacy and protection of its sensitive customer and financial data.
Papaya Global employs more than 700 workers in 21 locations worldwide.
The Challenge
As a cloud native global company running primarily on AWS, Papaya Global’s architects are responsible for an ever expanding cloud infrastructure with more data handlers joining on a weekly basis. They also manage a number of data pipeline integrations, resulting in data movement in and out of the public cloud.
As a payroll service provider, much of this is sensitive data, including personal and financial information, that comes with its own strict compliance standards. The company’s security team understands that to continuously secure its dynamic and sensitive cloud data, a data-centric approach to security is needed, with a focus on the data itself.
The first step was for the cloud and security teams to truly understand the precise location of all the sensitive data, who has access to it, and whether it has the right security posture for its level of sensitivity. But they also needed to make sure that their cloud engineers were not inhibited or slowed down in any way. The security team needed to enhance their existing approach with a smart solution to give them a clear, up to date picture of the security posture of their sensitive data at risk, keeping all data handlers on the same page to reduce friction.
“Sentra’s ability to help us find and remediate potential data risks, was proven immediately by finding critical misconfigurations and unprotected shadow data, giving us an unprecedented level of visibility and control over our company data.” - Nitai Sarna, Information Security, Director at Papaya Global
Sentra’s Solution & Unique Approach
Papaya Global’s Head of Information Security turned to Sentra and immediately understood the potential value of taking their security approach to the next level by quickly securing the company’s sensitive data, without a huge investment in resources or personnel. His team only needed a few minutes to set up Sentra’s DSPM solution to start seeing results from the data discovery and classification process.
The security team was able to see which specific data needed a stronger security posture, and the DevOps team was then able to take the information from Sentra and prioritize changes to their processes. In this case, their team added another layer of control to prevent these types of misconfigurations in the future.
In addition, Papaya Global experiences significant efficiency gains from integrating Sentra’s alerts with their existing cyber reports and monitoring processes. This empowers the team to quickly and easily stay on top of any new policy violations to remediate fast and effectively.
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Sentra's Impact
Papaya Global expanded their use of Sentra’s platform beyond the security team, bringing their DevOps and engineering teams on board to continuously monitor their data security posture. The company can now successfully:
- Keep their production and development environments separate and fully protected. This moves beyond checking security controls with the ability to detect any relevant violations in near real-time.
- Build and enforce security compliance with the ability to alert the right people within the company to quickly and accurately remediate any issues. The ability to enforce data privacy, keeps Papaya Global’s customers assured.
- Bring different security solutions together (via Sentra’s integrations) with varying sets of rules to ensure that the right members of the security team are alerted to any issues in time.
- Gain immediate data visibility and insights optimizing investigation time and making every second count when dealing with incidents e.g. discovering excess permissions.
Sentra’s platform provides Papaya Global with 24/7 coverage of their data security posture, which is crucial in a dynamic organization with a growing cloud infrastructure.
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How a Consumer App Company Secured Over 130 Petabytes in Weeks
How a Consumer App Company Secured Over 130 Petabytes in Weeks
A global Consumer App company manages vast, complex cloud environments spanning multiple continents and hundreds of petabytes of sensitive customer and operational data. But their legacy data classification tools were not designed for the massive scale and speed of their cloud data, especially when it came to identifying sensitive information buried deep in complex file formats like JSON and Parquet.
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The data security team’s existing classification tools were never built for the scale and complexity of a data estate over 130 petabytes. As regulatory requirements increased, and data structures became more nested and dynamic, manual tagging and legacy solutions became expensive, inaccurate, and unsustainable.
The team also faced an immense data security challenge: how to accurately classify sensitive information across an enormous cloud environment, while keeping operational costs in check. Their existing legacy tools lacked the precision and scalability to handle complex, nested file formats like JSON and Parquet, which are common in modern data engineering pipelines. Manual tagging was not only time-consuming but also inaccurate, resulting in low coverage and high compliance risk. With regulatory deadlines rapidly approaching, the security team needed a way to gain complete visibility into sensitive data, improve classification accuracy, and implement a scalable architecture that wouldn’t break the budget.
"Our previous solutions simply couldn't keep pace with the sheer volume and complexity of our cloud data. We needed a robust, cloud-native approach that was both effective and economically sound across our entire digital footprint."
— Deputy CISO
After evaluating multiple vendors, the company selected Sentra for its unique combination of deep technical sophistication and practical efficiency.
What stood out:
AI-Driven Classification at Scale: Sentra’s multi-model architecture, including GLiNER for Named Entity Recognition and embedding-based contextual detection, enabled granular, column-level classification, even inside deeply nested Parquet structures.
Cost-Efficient Ephemeral Scanning: Unlike always-on tools, Sentra’s ephemeral EC2 architecture scales to zero when not scanning. Combined with S3 inventory-based change detection and AI- driven smart sampling, it enables fast classification across hundreds of petabytes, at a fraction of the time and cost, and without impacting performance.
Seamless Terraform Deployment: Rapid deployment via infrastructure-as-code made it easy to scale Sentra across multiple environments while enforcing least-privilege access through dual-role AWS authentication.
Why Sentra: Accuracy and Efficiency at Cloud-Native Scale
"Sentra accurately uncovered mislabeled sensitive customer data, enabling rapid validation and remediation. It is now an indispensable element of our data protection strategy allowing us to stay compliant and keep our data protection promise to millions of customers around the world."
— Deputy CISO
Sentra was deployed and delivering results in the customer’s environment in just 12 days. During the initial proof of concept, the data security team was able to select where they wanted scanning to begin and easily configure the platform, allowing the solution to scan 1 terabyte of high-risk data across complex file formats to achieve over 98% classification accuracy. Sentra’s smart sampling approach prioritized the most sensitive and high-impact datasets, optimizing performance without sacrificing precision. The platform was deployed seamlessly using Terraform, integrating directly into the customer’s existing AWS architecture. A secure two-role access model, one for metadata access and another for scanning, ensured strict least-privilege control throughout the process.
Following the successful POC, the security team decided to continue scaling Sentra’s coverage across their vast data estate to cover hundreds of petabytes. The data security team was able to easily roll out Sentra according to their data priorities and leverage automation to minimize manual effort and dramatically accelerate risk remediation.
Protect Your Secret Sauce: Safeguard Critical IP in the Cloud
Protect Your Secret Sauce: Safeguard Critical IP in the Cloud
The Risk: Leveraging IP Creates Exposure
For manufacturers, intellectual property is everything. Formulas, patents, designs, and recipes are the secret sauce that fuel competitiveness. This critical data must flow through R&D teams, testing labs, and production lines to keep the business moving and thriving.
But in the cloud, this same accessibility that fuels innovation becomes a liability. Blueprints get duplicated in public OneDrives, recipes are stored in shared folders, and patents are over-permissioned to contractors or partners. A single accidental exposure can mean stolen IP, lost contracts, and potentially catastrophic business, financial, or reputational damage.
Security leaders need an accurate, efficient way to know exactly where intellectual property lives across their entire environment, who has access, and when and where it is copied or moved.
How Sentra Helps Security Teams Protect Critical IP
Sentra is built to transform how enterprises safeguard the data that matters most, at the speed and scale of modern cloud enterprises. The AI-powered platform automatically and continuously discovers, classifies, and protects both proprietary intellectual property and regulated customer data across multi-cloud and on-premises environments.
- Automatically discovers and classifies critical data, finding intellectual property everywhere it lives, including patents, designs, CAD files, formulas, communications, images, audio, and video files.
- Alerts about over-exposed IP to enforce least-privilege access so only the right teams and partners can access sensitive files.
- Automatically apply DLP labels for consistent controls across Microsoft 365 Purview, Google Drive, and AWS resource tagging.
- Continuously monitor in real time when files containing IP are overshared or moved and
automatically detect similar sensitive data. - Securely adopt AI while preventing privacy and compliance violations and sensitive corporate data
leakage. - Reduce risk at scale with agentless scanning that avoids outages, API throttling, or compute spikes.
With Sentra, organizations can embrace cloud and AI with confidence; securing their most valuable IP assets without slowing down innovation or production.
Why Security Teams Choose Sentra to Stop Insider Threats Faster
- Detect and mitigate insider-driven data loss in real-time
- Block risky sharing and apply encryption in SaaS tools like Google Drive and Microsoft 365
- Gain continuous visibility across multi-cloud and SaaS with a cloud-native architecture
- Automate least-privilege access control for unstructured and sensitive data
- Prioritize threats using context-aware insights from identity, behavior, and sensitivity
- Enhance DLP tools like MicrosoftPurview to extend coverage and control
How an Aerospace Firm Secured Proprietary Designs
An aerospace manufacturer used Sentra to discover, classify and remediate exposure risk to proprietary data such as; patents, algorithms, and CAD designs across Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Sentra quickly discovered duplicate blueprints in employee OneDrives and flagged overshared design files that could have leaked via collaboration. They also used Sentra to enforce their policy of masking all data stored on Snowflake by accurately identifying data as masked or unmasked. Finally, they created a ticketing workflow to automate and streamline remediation of urgent issues. The company cut exposed IP by over 80% in the first month. Deploying Sentra was simple and the scan quickly found exposed proprietary data, IP, and other critical data that if compromised or exfiltrated could cause catastrophic business, financial, or reputational damage.
