TechFinitive: Protecting Data in Use is Essential

Excerpt:

Data has been called many things: the new oil, the new gold, the lifeblood of modern organizations – all labels that recognize the critical role it plays in guiding strategy, driving decision-making, and supporting numerous use cases across global organizations. Assets this essential need to be protected, a fact that is widely recognized given the numerous ongoing efforts to mandate and incentivize this protection.

Many of these new laws and regulations are designed to emphasize the security of the data itself as well as the ownership and privacy of its source. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the recently passed EU AI Act are two notable examples of regulatory guidelines that are frequently heralded for their focus on driving foundational actions (‘Privacy by Design’).

But, despite this broad-reaching, globally dispersed activity, many organizations still have data-centric vulnerabilities either lurking in plain sight or greatly limiting value creation, including a failure to protect the usage of data. [...]

Thankfully, technology has delivered a solution to protecting Data in Use. The increasingly recognized category known as Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) is uniquely positioned to address these data processing pain points. PETs protect the usage of data by enhancing, enabling, and preserving the privacy and security of data throughout its lifecycle, allowing organizations to extract value from internal and external data sources without compromising the integrity of their efforts.

In practice, this means banks can leverage PII and other sensitive information to conduct fraud investigations across jurisdictional boundaries. Pharmaceutical companies can securely utilize public datasets without compromising competitive advantage. Public sector users can perform analysis over open-source data sources without relieving their interest in the data. Insurance companies can cross-match global assets to speed the customer onboarding process while respecting regulatory restrictions.   

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