Data Clean Rooms: A Secret Weapon Against Data Breaches and Data Security Vulnerabilities

Nicolai Baldin, CEO of Synthesized, talks about some recent studies that suggested the global cost of data breaches in 2021 will reach $6 trillion annually. These numbers highlight the devastating impact data breaches can have on organizations, he also addresses how data clean rooms can help protect against these attacks. 

Whether the loss of data happens as a result of a cyberattack, or an employee accidentally misconfiguring a cloud security application and inadvertently exposing data, the repercussions are the same: damaged brand, damaged reputation and very costly fines. Take Marriott Hotels, in 2020 the company was fined over $24 million for a breachOpens a new window that was discovered back in 2018. The breach was undetected for years and exposed the personal information of over 500 million guests within a booking system.

Cybercrime damagesOpens a new window are projected to cost over $10.5 trillion by the year 2025. It is not surprising that the majority of CEOs (76%) are reportedlyOpens a new window losing sleep over becoming the next big breach victim and are nervous about the security of their data. 

While they understand data innovation is critical to their survival, many prefer to keep their data safely locked away and accessed by a select few to limit it from falling into the wrong hands.

However, the bad news for these organizations is that it is impossible today for businesses to grow and succeed without data innovation. Any organization that is not driving insights and innovation from their data is unlikely to survive long in our hyper-competitive market.

Empowering Data-Innovation Through Data Clean Rooms

Data-driven innovation (DDI) is one of the latest buzz phrases to hit the tech industry and it often involves organizations using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to drive new services and products by analyzing their data.

Research from McKinsey has suggested that recent advances in AI are increasing the number of avenues for organizations to activate data’s superpowers, from hiring to product development to customer engagement.

While data-driven innovation offers organizations major benefits, many organizations struggle to get access to data they can actually use. Regulations on data privacy prohibit organizations from sharing data externally, or even internally, which limits an organization’s ability to innovate through data.

Learn More: Navigating Enterprise Data Security Journey

So, what is the solution, how can organizations protect the privacy and security of their data but still empower data-driven innovation?

Empower Secure Data Sharing With Data Clean Rooms

One of the safest ways to overcome collaboration challenges is through the use of data clean rooms. Data clean rooms empower secure data sharing and collaboration across internal groups, remote teams, and external partners. The deployments are pristine, isolated environments that can be set up within minutes and are programmed to receive data, but not let it leave. The environments act as a walled garden providing multiple parties (even from different organizations) with access to the same data so they can work jointly on innovation projects. 

From a security perspective, data clean rooms allow organisations to access and collaborate on their data with third parties, without the risk of it falling victim to a cyberattack or leakage. The rooms are tightly integrated with an enterprise’s logging and monitoring tools, to provide a full audit of all data access and data movement.

An additional step to improve security is also with the use of synthetic data within data clean rooms, where organizations use AI to generate new, high-quality simulated datasets that mimic original data in a matter of minutes. The simulated data looks feels and behaves exactly as the original data would, but sensitive attributes are removed making it of no value to cybercriminals.

Organizations can still use the data to drive innovation and gain insights into their customers and services because the data is synthetic it is not impacted by regulatory compliance. Some more advanced synthetic data generation tools also have the ability to address bias within data sets and identify when some groups are unrepresented. The technology can then rebalance the data to include underrepresented groups so that organizations have a broader understanding of an entire market.

Learn More: Political Cost of Data Leaks: Data Security in the Crosshairs

Data Clean Rooms Are the New Security Channels

Data is a key pillar for growth today and data-driven innovation is essential to gain an edge over competitors and better serve customers. Data clean rooms empower secure data sharing and collaboration across internal groups, remote teams, and external partners and they offer a new and secure way where organizations can safely exchange data without compromising security. When teaming up data clean rooms with data-synthesis technology, organizations are bolstering their security a step further,  reducing the chance of it being breached or accidentally exposed.

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