What Benefits are Provided by Custom Reports?

In the Spirion Sensitive Data Platform, custom reports provide the flexibility to move beyond standard dashboards and extract specific, actionable insights tailored to your organization's unique governance and compliance needs.

The primary benefits of using custom reports are described in the sections below:

1. Granular Data Filtering and Selection

While standard dashboards provide a high-level "health check," custom reports enable you to pick and choose exactly which data points (columns) you want to see.

Specific Data Types: You can create a report that shows only the Social Security Numbers found in the Finance department, excluding all other noise.
Custom Metadata: You can include internal metadata like Tags, Business Units, or Application IDs that aren't always visible in standard views.

2. Point-in-Time Historical Auditing

Custom reports provide the "Include historical data" setting.

Benefit: Enabling this setting is the only way to perform a "look-back" audit.
- You can generate a report showing exactly what your sensitive data footprint looked like on a specific date (for example, the last day of a fiscal quarter) to satisfy regulatory requirements like PCI-DSS or HIPAA.

3. Automated Stakeholder Distribution

Custom reports can be scheduled to run and be delivered automatically.

Targeted Reporting: You can set up a schedule where the HR Manager receives a PDF of HR-related findings every Monday morning, while the IT Security team receives a CSV of all "High Risk" findings daily.
Reduced Manual Effort: This eliminates the need for a Spirion admin to manually export and email data to different departments.

4. Advanced Data Aggregation

Custom reports allow you to group and summarize data in ways the standard "Results" grid cannot.

Risk Scoring: You can create reports that aggregate "Weight Scores" by department to identify which area of the business poses the highest relative risk.
Match Density: You can identify "Hotspots"—single files or folders that contain thousands of matches—which are often the most critical items to remediate first.

5. Audit-Ready Documentation

Custom reports provide a clean, professional format for external auditors.

Remediation Tracking: You can build a report that shows "Found Date" vs. "Remediated Date" to prove that your organization is meeting its internal Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for data cleanup.
Ignore Justification: You can export a report of all "Ignored" items along with their Ignore Reasons and Ticket Numbers, providing a complete audit trail of why certain data was excluded from the risk pool.

6. Integration with Downstream Tools

Because custom reports can be exported in formats like CSV or JSON, they serve as a bridge to other enterprise tools.

SIEM/SOAR: You can export custom report data to feed into tools like Splunk or Sentinel for broader security orchestration.
BI Tools: Data from custom reports can be imported into PowerBI or Tableau to create custom executive visualizations that combine Spirion data with other corporate metrics.

7. Performance Optimization

By creating a custom report that only queries the specific tables and timeframes you need, you can often retrieve data much faster than browsing the entire "Results" database, which may contain millions of rows of irrelevant information.

Summary

Custom reports transform Spirion from a "search tool" into a governance engine.

They enable you to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time, proving both compliance and operational efficiency.