Is Your Data Safe? The Right Approach To Data Security In Five Steps

Data security has never been as important as it is today. At Datameer, the security of your data is as important to us as it is to you. This is why companies working with very sensitive customer data – some of the world’s largest banks, healthcare insurers and telecommunications firms such as Citi, HSBC, Aetna, Anthem, Optum and Sprint/Pinsight Media – all trust Datameer for their data preparation and exploration needs.

Unfortunately, other vendors such as Alteryx don’t think this way, as seen with their most recent careless data breach Cavalier use and attitudes towards data leads to missteps that cause breaches.

But, is important to also remember that with security and governance, architecture matters. In their most recent Market Guide for Data Preparation, Gartner states:

“Data preparation — the most time-consuming task in analytics and BI — is evolving from a self-service activity to an enterprise imperative.”

And, as data preparation moves to an enterprise level, there are important architectural aspects (as well as features) that will determine how effective your security and governance policies are to protect your data and keep you in regulatory compliance.

One result of big data analytics is that companies gather and use more information about their customers to help serve them better and more efficiently. Much of the data used in the analytics process revolves around “who” the customer is, “what” actions they take and “how” they behave.

A great deal of this data is “personal” information, or PII, about the customer, which requires extra care and safekeeping. Many different government regulations stipulate how PII needs to be secured to protect consumers and deter non-compliance with stiff fines for breaches.

Now, there are additional regulations, such as GDPR, that not only stipulate that you must secure data, but also regulate how you can use the data based on consent. This means you need an end-to-end audit trail of how data is used.

Many self-service data preparation tools such as Alteryx are designed to run on an analyst desktop or local server. The self-service UIs and ability to work on data locally are the two initial aspects that attract individual analysts or groups to use these products. It gives them independence from the IT teams.

But these architectures have one inherent and rather large flaw – data movement. Set aside the fact that moving data can be very costly on resources. Moving data creates a highly disjointed overall architecture with the inability to provide end-to-end security and governance.

Once data is moved from your data lake, it is up to the local users or teams to apply security policies and govern how data is used. No enterprise policies can be applied and enforced. You lose track of security and how the data is being used, and are unable to effectively govern the data any longer.

Products such as Alteryx can be even more dangerous because they have specific add-ons to enrich your data with consumer “demographic, segmentation, and firmographic data from Experian, D&B, the US Census Bureau, and more.” It was this data that was discovered and breached on the internet, and deemed highly dangerous by Chris Vickery, a cybersecurity researcher from UpGuard.

While intended to serve a good purpose in their analytics, independent self-service data preparation products running on desktops or local servers can potentially leave this data unsecured and potentially misused. This could bring major fines from regulator bodies and loss of trust with the public, which can lead to lost sales.

Datameer has the industry’s most extensive security, governance and auditing features to ensure your data is protected, and you can constantly ensure data is properly being used. It prepares and processes data in one place eliminating security holes due to data movement.