TechFinitive: Rethinking Data Collaboration

Excerpt:

Data quite literally powers the world. Businesses across verticals are constantly evaluating inputs, extracting insights, and looking for data-driven ways to optimize and expand. While organizations may have once been limited to assets collected and retained within their operations, valuable data can now come from anywhere. Business and IT leaders increasingly leverage data from commercial and other third-party data sources, including partner entities. We all want access to more data and the ability to utilize broader, more diverse datasets — especially for data-hungry functions such as AI/ML — that can provide both near- and long-term advantages. This is what makes the idea of leveraging data from a variety of entities so appealing. 

But, no matter how much value a data-sharing agreement may provide, there are few circumstances where business leaders will capture that advantage by sacrificing ownership or control of their assets. Once data is shared, pooled, or changed hands, control is gone. [...]

So do these types of challenges kill the idea of data collaboration altogether? Thankfully the answer to that question is no. The desire (and necessity) to share and collectively utilize data is one of the reasons for the growth in awareness around Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs), a family of technologies that enhance, preserve, and enable the privacy and security of data throughout its lifecycle.

While there is an abundance of reports and case studies on the value of PETs from influential global entities, including regulatory and government bodies in the UK, US and Singapore, the impact of these technologies is most consequential for use cases where data needs to be both used and protected. This is what makes them uniquely suited to enable data collaboration efforts.

This category, which includes technology pillars such as homomorphic encryption, secure multiparty computation, and trusted execution environments, allows organizations to work together to leverage assets in a way that does not require the transfer of data ownership or risk violating legal barriers by exposing sensitive or regulated assets.   

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