Unifying Multi-Cloud Data Security with Sentra: How Valenz Health Scaled PHI Protection Post-Merger

The Challenge

Cloud-Scale Growth Exposed a Critical Data Blind Spot

As a cloud-native financial services leader, the digital bank leverages cloud infrastructure to support lending, investing, and wealth management services. Their security team selected Wiz as its Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) platform to identify misconfigurations, exposed resources, and potential attack paths across its expanding cloud footprint.

While Wiz delivered strong visibility into cloud configuration risk, the team quickly encountered a familiar challenge: configuration risk alone does not provide a comprehensive view of data risk. Wiz could effectively identify exposed or misconfigured resources, but it lacked deep, accurate insight into what data actually lived inside those assets, especially unstructured data. This made it difficult to distinguish between theoretical risk and true exposure involving sensitive customer information.

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In one investigation, the security team discovered files containing sensitive customer data that Wiz had flagged as misconfigured but could not contextualize based on data sensitivity. Without reliable, context-rich classification, the security team lacked confidence in prioritization and response.

The result: uncertainty, noise, and delayed escalation when real data exposure was at stake.

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“Integrating Sentra with Wiz fundamentally changed how we evaluate cloud risk. For the first time, we can see not just where a misconfiguration exists, but what sensitive data is actually at stake. That context lets us prioritize real exposures, reduce noise, and respond with far greater confidence.”
— Director of Application Security 

Why Wiz + Sentra

CSPM Without Data Intelligence is Incomplete

The user’s experience reflects a broader reality across cloud-first enterprises: CSPM tools - even those that list DSPM capabilities - lack the depth, accuracy, and scale needed to truly understand sensitive data risk. Configuration context without data context leaves security teams guessing.

To close this gap, the security team paired Wiz with Sentra’s Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) platform. Sentra was selected because it delivers deep, accurate, and scalable data intelligence that CSPM platforms alone cannot provide:

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• AI-based data classification that accurately identifies PII, PCI, credentials, secrets, and regulated data
  
  
• High-speed, petabyte-scale scanning designed for efficiency at large data volumes
  
  
• Comprehensive coverage across cloud, on-prem, data lakes, and SaaS
  
  
• Context-rich unstructured data classification, addressing the ~80% of enterprise data other DSPMs struggle to analyze
  
  
• Agentless deployment that enables fast time-to-value without operational friction
  
  

By integrating Sentra with Wiz, they gained the missing layer: trusted data truth.

Turning Signals Into Real Risk

From Misconfigurations to Meaningful Exposure

With Sentra enriching Wiz findings, the security team now evaluates cloud risk based on actual data exposure, not assumptions.

Sentra continuously discovers and classifies sensitive data, feeding high-fidelity data context directly into Wiz. This enables “toxic combination” detection when sensitive data resides in exposed, misconfigured, or attack-path-accessible resources.

Instead of treating all misconfigurations as equal, the team can now answer the most important security question with certainty:

“Does this issue expose sensitive data and how severe is the impact?”

This clarity transforms Wiz alerts from broad signals into actionable, prioritized risks.

Business Impact

Precision, Prioritization, and Confidence at Scale

By combining Wiz CSPM with Sentra DSPM, digital bank established a unified view of cloud and data risk that materially improved security outcomes:

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• Risk Prioritization
  Clear differentiation between hypothetical risk and true data exposure based on accurate classification.
  
  
• SOC Efficiency
  High-risk findings are automatically escalated, reducing noise and alert fatigue.
  
  
• Improved Compliance Readiness
  Stronger evidence for audits and regulatory requirements across financial services environments.
  
  
• Unified Risk Intelligence
  A cohesive view across infrastructure, identity, and sensitive data that enables better decisions at speed.
  
  

Wiz + Sentra:
Setting a New Standard for Cloud and Data Security

In an industry where data exposure carries significant financial and reputational risk, this leading digital bank has adopted a comprehensive, intelligence-driven security model. Wiz provides critical visibility into cloud posture and attack paths and Sentra delivers the data context required to make those insights meaningful.

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Together, Wiz and Sentra enable security teams to move beyond surface-level signals to true exposure awareness, helping organizations secure what matters most as cloud environments scale.

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This partnership demonstrates a clear lesson for modern enterprises:CSPM is powerful—but only when paired with accurate, scalable, data-first intelligence.

One of the largest U.S. mortgage lenders manages over $350 billion in loans across a complex ecosystem of production and non-production cloud environments. They rely on data-intensive applications to support underwriting, processing, and customer management.

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Given the nature of their business, mortgage lenders and financial institutions are subject to stringent and multi-layered data protection and privacy regulations, such as; FTC Safeguards Rule, Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), SOX, FFIEC guidelines, and increasingly state-level privacy laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Compliance requires rigorous control over non-production data environments where customer data often gets replicated for development and testing. Most relevant regulations either require or recommend data masking for sensitive customer data.

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The mortgage lender had a legacy DSPM solution that generated large volumes of false positives, and lacked the precision to support automated masking workflows needed to ensure compliance. This created significant manual overhead for the data security team. 

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The financial institution’s data security and compliance teams turned to Sentra and within weeks, they gained column-level visibility into regulated data, automated classification and masking of workflows, and uncovered hundreds of orphaned data stores that could be deleted to both significantly improve regulatory compliance, reduce storage costs and reduce manual workload for the security team.

The Challenge: Manual Masking and Limited Data Visibility

The mortgage lender uses a data masking tool to mask regulated data in non-production environments. Their previous DSPM solution lacked depth and breadth of classification and created too many false positives, leading to over-masking and a labor intensive manual verification process. This made it very difficult to spot what data needed to be masked. Like all financial institutions, the lender also has many sensitive data classifications unique to its business operations that had to be manually tagged. Together, all these classification limitations made it difficult to create data reports to feed to their data masking tool.

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For known and correctly classified sensitive data, their data masking tool was able to transform it into realistic synthetic records. Once the original required data masking was performed, there was no reliable way to confirm whether data remained masked after refreshes, especially since the masked data resembled real data so closely. The mortgage lender needed visibility into where PII/PCI and toxic data combinations lived across non-production environments and accurately classified sensitive data before and after being masked.

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“The challenge wasn't just masking data; it was the persistent uncertainty of whether that data stayed masked after system refreshes. We needed a reliable way to verify ongoing compliance at a granular level.”

— Chief Compliance Officer, Leading US Mortgage Lender

Why Sentra: Column-Level Precision, Workflow Automation, and Immediate ROI

After a thorough evaluation of leading DSPM vendors, the mortgage lender chose Sentra due  to several key capabilities. Its flexible classifier system, which supports both regex and contextual logic using AI-powered classifiers, made it easier to identify masked and unmasked data accurately. The platform’s policy engine offered automated scanning for missing or reverted markers, helping teams detect issues early. Sentra also seamlessly integrated into existing workflows without requiring invasive changes to systems or processes.

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Key Outcomes:

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• Fast AI-Driven Column-Level Classification: Sentra’s precise tagging engine classified sensitive data across their entire environment in just six weeks, outperforming other vendor tools by automatically identifying PII/PCI, financial data, and compliance-relevant data types.
  
• Improved Accuracy: With Sentra the compliance and data security teams are able to create a clear view of all the data that needs to be masked and feed this information into their data masking tool for future masking. Sentra can detect whether a dataset contains markers like "@example.com" emails or specially formatted SSNs.
  
• Automated Data Masking via Jira: Sentra integrated with their existing data masking tool to mask data and pushed alerts to Jira, enabling end-to-end remediation workflows with executive visibility.
  
• Granular Visibility: By using data classifications and logical negation (e.g., “does not contain marker”), the compliance team can isolate and track both compliant and non-compliant datasets.
  
• Policy-based Automation: Sentra’s automatic policies engine is set to run on a regular schedule, identifying data assets without expected markers, allowing the compliance and data security teams to take action before audits or incidents occur.
• Compliance Confidence
  Able to ensure compliance with multi-layered data protection and privacy regulations and internal security mandates for precise access and masking.
  

Implementation: From Manual Compliance Burden to Automated Remediation

The mortgage lender deployed Sentra in under six weeks, scanning thousands of data stores across AWS, Snowflake and other cloud and SaaS environments and applied accurate sensitivity labels. Sentra’s classification output determined user roles based on data sensitivity. The integration with Jira and their data masking tool enabled an automated masking workflow, flagging issues to executives and eliminating manual triage.

Following the initial deployment, the financial institution decided to build on this momentum and extend Sentra’s coverage to Google Workspace.

Real Business Impact: Data Visibility, Accurate Masking, and Compliance Confidence‍

With Sentra, the data security and compliance teams gained deep visibility into sensitive and regulated data across cloud environments and SaaS applications, transforming how they enforce compliance and scale a proactive, automated data protection strategy.

Mortgage Lender and Sentra: Turning Compliance into a Competitive Advantage

What started as a goal to streamline masking and compliance has become a long-term foundation for cloud data governance. The data security team replaced an underperforming legacy DSPM and gained deep visibility into sensitive and regulated data across cloud environments and SaaS applications, transforming how they enforce compliance and scale a proactive, automated data protection strategy. They also implemented a strategic, automated framework for protecting customer data across every environment and ensuring compliance.

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Together, the mortgage lender and Sentra have transformed how the financial institution security team supports excellence in development speed, data protection, and regulatory compliance.