Sharing our data is an important part of our day to day activities, be that for analysis, collaboration or system development, we need to be able to share data sets.
However, this need to share has to be balanced with our needs to maintain the security of our data assets.
I saw a great example of this recently with a company who were convinced they were suffering a data breach and having data leak to their competitors. They investigated all the areas you’d expect, data going out via email, been uploaded to sites that it shouldn’t, or been copied to external devices and leaving the company. None of this investigation seemed to identify any areas of leak.
They then discovered that they had a team of developers who, in order to carry out their dev and test work, where given copies of the full production database, so not only given all of the organisations sensitive data, but they had full and unencumbered administrative access to it.
Now, I’m not saying the developers where at the centre of the leak, however you can see the dilemma, for the business to function and develop, the software teams needed access to real data that represented actual working sets, but too provide that, the business was exposing itself to a real data security threat.
How do we address that problem and allow our data to be useful for analysis, collaboration and development, while keeping it secure and the information contained safe and private?
One answer is data anonymization and that is the subject of this week’s show, as I’m joined by Harry Keen, CEO and founder of anon.ai an innovative new company looking to address many of the challenges that come with data anonymization.
In our wide-ranging discussion, we explore the part anonymization plays in compliance and protection and why the difficulty of current techniques means that we often poorly anonymize data, or we are not even bothering.
We explore why anonymization is so difficult and how solutions that can automate and simplify the process will make this important addition to our data security toolkit, more accessible to us all.
Anonymization plays an important part in allowing us to maintain the value of our data as a usable and flexible asset while maintaining its privacy and our compliance with ever-tightening regulation.
Harry provides some great insights into the challenge and some of the ways to address it.
To find out more on this topic, check out the following resources;
The UK Anonymization Network (UKAN)
The UK Information Commissioner (ICO)
And of course you can find out more about anon.ai here
You can follow Harry on twitter @harry_keen18 and anon.ai @anon_dot_ai
You can contact anon.ai via info@anon.ai
Hopefully, that’s given you some background into the challenges of data anonymization and how you can start to address them, allowing you to continue to extract value from your data while maintaining its privacy.
Next week I’m joined by Ian Moore as we take a Blockchain 101, to ensure you catch that episode why not subscribe to the show? you can find us in all the usual podcast homes.
Until next time, thanks for listening.
Techstringy 