Companies today are struggling to manage their sprawling data estates, and to minimize the risks that they pose. Vendors are furiously building tools to help ease that pain. But the disconnected nature of point-tool development is hurting efficiency as data becomes more distributed. Could a single platform approach address this modern data challenge?
The answer is yes, according to Dmitiri Sirota, who co-founded BigID back in 2016 and is the company’s CEO. While there are bigger names in the data management business with more products and a longer history than BigID, Sirota is confident that his company has an architectural advantage.
“We’re kind of reimagining data management as truly an open, extensible platform, built on a common discovery foundation,” Sirota says. “That’s our bet.”
When BigID was founded, the plan was to build the industry’s most scalable data discovery engine and data catalog. This segment of the market was growing fast, as organizations needed better tools for simply finding where data was being created and stored, whether it’s in databases, file systems, data lakes, or SaaS or on-prem applications.
But as customers started logging metadata in the BigID database, the company found ways to augment the catalog with additional capabilities. It added a classification engine to tell security professional where sensitive data was located. It added a Cluster analysis to show IT professionals where duplicate data resides. Then added a graph correlation engine as the basis for access control.
BigID calls it the four Cs–catalog, classification, cluster analysis, and correlation. The company has a different user audience in mind for each C.
“Cloud and infrastructure professionals want to know, where do I have duplicate data, where do I have similar data? Cluster analysis answers that,” he says. “Security wants to know where do I have sensitive data? Classification answers that.” Governance folks wants to understand, where do I have metadata, and the catalog answers that. Privacy people want to know where is the PII? Correlation answers that.
This was the core architecture that BigID had in place 18 months ago, which was the last time we checked in with Sirota. Since then, it’s bolstered its data management lineup with a series of applications that allow the governance, security, Privacy, and infrastructure professionals to query the system and get the data they need.
“So not only do we give you the coverage, the discovery in depth with the 4 Cs,” Sirota says. “But then from that kind of data insight, that data intelligence, we give you some functionality about what you could do with it.”
So you want to perform data rights management? There’s an app for that, Sirota says. You want to do privacy or preferences management? There is an app for that. There are apps for security remediation, data transfers and sovereignty, data quality, and data retention app. All told, BigID offers nearly 20 apps across privcy, protection, and perspecdtive, on top of its discovery foundation
Sirota compares this diversity of data management capabilities to a smartphone with multiple lenses, which gives different perspectives on their subject. The data accessed by each of these apps remains the same, but the viewpoints differ depending on the needs of the user.
That trick can only be achieved through a certain amount of centralization. BigID does collect and track a lot of metadata (it also tracks actual data values for some uses, such as for providing a data profile). Users don’t have to take advantage of all of the capabilities that depend on that tracking of data and metadata, but they can be turned on when the user needs them.
“Each app is discrete. Each capability around the four Cs is discrete,” Sirota says. “So you can start small. You could go big. It’s all entirely up to you. But again, it’s part of our strategy…We don’t require everybody to buy everything.”
BigID isn’t the only vendor offering these capabilities.
