Protecting sensitive data and preventing unintended data exposure is critical for businesses. However, many organizations lack the tools to stay on top of where sensitive data resides across their enterprise. It’s particularly concerning when sensitive data shows up in unexpected places – for example, in logs that  services generate, when customers inadvertently send it in a customer support chat, or when managing unstructured analytical workloads. This is where Automatic Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for BigQuery can help.

Data discovery and classification is often implemented as a manual, on-demand process, and as a result  happens less frequently than many organizations would like. With a large amount of data being created on the fly, a more modern, proactive approach is to build discovery and classification into existing data analytics tools. By making it automatic, you can ensure that a key way to surface risk happens continuously - an example of Google Cloud's invisible security strategy. Automatic DLP is a fully-managed service that continuously scans data across your entire organization to give you general awareness of what data you have, and specific visibility into where sensitive data is stored and processed. This awareness is a critical first step in protecting and governing your data and acts as a key control to help improve your security, privacy, and compliance posture.

In October of last year, we announced the public preview for Automatic DLP for BigQuery. Since the announcement, our customers have already scanned and processed both structured and unstructured BigQuery data at multi-petabyte scale to identify where sensitive data resides and gain visibility into their data risk. That’s why we are happy to announce that Automatic DLP is now Generally Available. As part of the release we’ve also added several new features to make it even easier to understand your data and to make use of the insights in more Cloud workflows. These features include:

• Premade Data Studio dashboards to give you more advanced summary, reporting, and investigation tools that you can customize to your business needs.