SaaS Data Ownership: The Key to Data Protection and More Impactful Machine Intelligence
In this special guest feature, Joe Gaska, Founder and CEO of GRAX, discusses how SaaS data ownership is the key to data protection and more impactful machine intelligence. Under Joe’s leadership, GRAX has become the fastest-growing application in Salesforce’s history. He has been featured on the main stage at Dreamforce and has won numerous awards including the Salesforce Innovation Award. Prior to founding GRAX, Joe built Ionia Corporation and successfully sold it to LogMein (Xively), which is now a part of the Google IoT Cloud. Joe holds a BA in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Maine at Farmington.
With Gartner reporting that 97% of organizations having some form of SaaS applications in their technology stack, the question of SaaS data ownership is quickly becoming something we can no longer sweep under the rug. Cloud applications are everywhere and so is the sensitive customer data stored in them. And while most organizations have caught on to the fact that they need to take direct ownership of their SaaS data, many still see it as just a compliance checkbox.
But the data stored and repeatedly overwritten in our SaaS applications represents a historical record of cause and effect change patterns in our business. This data, aside from being essential for compliance and data privacy, represents the biggest missed opportunity to improve modern-day machine learning algorithms. It is the literal “cause and effect” information gap that machine learning algorithms need to make sense of why things change in our business. Some of the most iconic companies in the world that we buy from daily, wear on our wrists, have in our pockets, or rely on to power the internet, are starting to catch on to this opportunity –and they are using an old set of tools in a new way in order to drive unfair advantage in their markets. SaaS Data Privacy and Protection
With most major clouds (AWS, Azure and GCP, to name a few), data warehouses and other traditional tools now offering extensive protections and configurability for a myriad of regulatory scenarios, the elephant in the room remains SaaS or cloud applications.
When it comes to CRM, third-party marketing automation tools or just about any other SaaS application, businesses are often at a loss about how to extend the same protections to sensitive customer data stored in those tools. Yet, those same tools are the lifeblood of our organizations – they are literally the mechanisms that move us forward in our markets. So we audit our vendors, force them to sign BAAs or other industry-specific affidavits, block non-compliant tools and hope for the best. When GDPR requests come in, we do our very best to comply, hoping to limit our liability if something goes awry. Meanwhile, as individuals, we opine about the lack of protection extended to our own personal data in all of the cloud apps in which it is stored.
