Concentric AI announced it has earned a fifth patent, recognizing its ongoing innovation and pioneering efforts to advance data security. This latest patent furthers the company's lead over the competition in optimizing user security groups and data access permissions to mitigate risks.

The newly granted patent, "Methods and Systems for Optimizing Grouping for Enhanced Access Control and Risk Mitigation in an Enterprise," protects existing intellectual property for Concentric AI's Semantic Intelligence data security governance platform. It recognizes the unique way the technology protects sensitive data by optimizing user security groups and mitigating risk for enterprise access governance and security management.

Organizations heavily rely on security groups to manage access to sensitive data. They assign permissions so group members have access required to perform their roles. However, as organizations expand, the number of security groups can grow. This increases the complexity of managing access rights and protecting sensitive information, while broadening the threat surface. Concentric AI's invention uniquely analyzes existing security groups, their user memberships, and associated permissions to identify redundant, obsolete, or overly permissive groups, and potentially generate new security groups without impacting business continuity.

This new patent award comes on the heels of the recently announced "Methods and Systems for Identifying Anomalous Users Exhibiting Overreaching Access Permissions to Data Objects," "Methods and Systems for Clustering Documents based on Semantic Similarity," and "Method and Electronic Device for Managing Sensitive Data based on Semantic Categorization" patents, recognizing that Concentric AI is at the forefront of data security innovation tackling real-world data security challenges.

"This latest patent - one of five awarded to Concentric AI - addresses a critical data security challenge: managing excessive security groups and permissions," said Karthik Krishnan, Concentric AI Founder and CEO. "The unchecked accumulation of security groups and redundant permissions can introduce significant risks. Our patented technology helps organizations streamline access controls, optimize security group configurations, and strengthen their overall security posture."

Concentric AI's collection of patents recognizes the company for its technical leadership and commitment to innovation. In the most recent case, user group permissions are frequently granted in an ad hoc manner, with little consideration for ongoing validation or periodic review. As users gain access to resources beyond what is required for their roles, the organization becomes more vulnerable to security threats. Risks created include malicious entities exploiting excessive or unmonitored permissions, potentially leading to unauthorized access, data breaches, and other security incidents.

However, making changes to security groups can have a negative impact on business operations. Removing users from security groups or eliminating groups can disrupt legitimate access to critical resources, hindering employees from performing their job functions. This risk makes enterprises cautious about modifying or streamlining group configurations, even when outdated or redundant groups are identified.

Concentric AI's Semantic Intelligence solution provides advanced data security governance by discovering both structured and unstructured data across cloud and on-premises repositories. Its proprietary AI understands context-enabling it to detect not only PII, PCI, and PHI, but also intellectual property and critical business documents that don't follow fixed patterns. The solution classifies and tags data automatically, identifies risks from over-permissive access or inappropriate sharing, and can take action-either autonomously or by working with your existing security stack-to secure data quickly and continuously.