Abstract: A data protection system is provided to detect data and execute security actions on the detected data using multiple tiers of parallel processing and incremental processing. For example, the data protection system can employ parallel job-submission and parallel-job execution to cataloging, scanning, searching, and other processes. Only source data that has not already been processed or has modified may be loaded to a cataloging data queue and a scanning data queue to reduce processing time. Scan results can include different data groups and can be used to search for specific data sets.