Allianz Ireland is one of the largest general insurers in Ireland and part of the Allianz Group, a leading global financial services provider and the largest property and casualty insurer in the world.

Allianz realised that, in order to protect sensitive or valuable information assets, they needed to understand and distinguish between the different types of information used by the organisation. As part of the Allianz Group Security Policy and Standard (in part based on ISO27001) Allianz Group requires a classification system to be used by all Operating Entities, which identifies information assets and specifies their individual need for protection. Following the implementation of the Boldon James Classifier product in July 2013, which coincided with their roll-out of Office 2010, Allianz Ireland saw their gap audit score for data classification move from 27% in 2012 to 89% in 2013.

"We knew there was technology that would allow us to do better, but realised it would be a huge task to classify every item of information across the system, and to introduce a new culture moving forward," said Orla Barry, Information Security Officer at Allianz Ireland. "We started with an initial pilot with Boldon James with 35 people across the business, which was very successful, so we rolled out the product to all 650 users."

A new culture was needed within the business to identify and secure the vast amounts of data that was being created and shared. Based on spot checks carried out in Allianz Ireland, they saw a 60% improvement in employee awareness of data security practices from June 2013 to October 2013.

"We're delighted to be working with Allianz Ireland to help them with their data classification needs. One of the key considerations when working with the company was that they understood that a new culture was needed in the organisation." commented Martin Sugden, Managing Director of Boldon James. "We worked with Allianz Ireland to ensure thatre that what they were implementing would work within their business. We developed a new 'bulk classification' tool specifically for them which could assign owners to shared drives who could then classify documents en masse"