Data privacy: navigating the maze that is data privacy

Data privacy has become one of the hottest topics of the 21st century

In order to avoid the risk of lax data privacy, an organisation may need to invest in the following techniques;

1. Data masking
2. Automated Statistical Generalisation
3. Format-preserving Tokenisation

All of these sound like big, scary techniques that can be extremely complicated to implement across the whole company – but it still stands that the best policy would be to apply all of these techniques (and more!).

Using Privitar Publisher, one can create many layers of data privacy protocols that can be consistent and repeatable across both sources and applications. This means that organisation-wide data policy can be orchestrated from one central point.

On Privitar Publisher’s UI, the user can create their data privacy policies without any coding required – meaning that policies can be understood and set by a number of different employees. The policies are stored in a central repository, where other business areas of an organisation can access them – meaning consistency in data privacy across your whole organisation.

Privitar Publisher is used as an orchestration tool where multiple technologies can be used to perform the data de-identification actions - for example Hadoop, data streaming, or Publisher On-Demand (Privitar’s own application for data de-identification jobs).

Your data is stored in a Protected Data Domain (PDD). A PDD can be accessed by the tools performing the de-identification actions, as well as surrounding tools (such as file systems, and databases). Each individual PDD can only be accessed for the individual user case (e.g. DevOps can only access the DevOps PDD). The PDD also takes care of watermarking and metadata tagging – which takes a lot of the headaches out of your data governance protocol.

There has never been a time where data de-identification has been more important for organisations – and Privitar should be your first port-of-call. The specialised software performs many actions of data de-identification, meaning that your organisation in a much safer position regarding data privacy.