The purpose of EDM, as with DLP, is to protect sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII) from exposure to the internet. Protecting such information becomes more difficult as organizations adopt cloud services, where managing security functions such as permissions, endpoint security, and remediation all increase an organization's risk of misconfiguration—the top cause of cloud data breaches. Exact data match is a method of data classification, which is a critical element of DLP. Typically, DLP systems use pattern matching to identify data that needs to be protected. A DLP system will monitor data such as credit card numbers, account numbers, Social Security numbers (SSNs), and so on depending on the types of records the administrator selects for protection and the policies attached to them. EDM helps these values stay protected on an exact basis rather than a tangential one, meaning that the value itself has its own security protocol rather than a group of values being treated as one. This schema will help security teams reduce the amount of false positives—or unnecessary notifications—they receive. Learn more.