Privya Develops Solution to Move Data Security to the Left, Abandon Stealth

As regulatory complexity increases on all sides following the introduction of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in 2018, more and more organizations are struggling to meet regulators’ demands.

Not only do decision-makers need to be able to discover sensitive data, they also need to classify it and implement an appropriate level of access control.

Providers like Privyaa data privacy code scanning platform that has just emerged from stealth uses AI to perform automated privacy assessments, analyze legacy code, and identify exposed personally identifiable information (PII).

By using AI in this way, security teams can increase transparency about corporate assets and reduce the likelihood of non-compliance with data protection regulations such as the CCPA and the Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Identifying data to defend

The announcement comes as more and more organizations struggle to meet regulatory demands. Nowhere is this emphasized more clearly than in the case of Facebookwho was fined $18.6 million this year for non-compliance with the GDPR for violations that occurred in 2018.

Research also indicates that 89% of organizations do not comply with the CCPA.

Compliance remains a challenge, not because organizations don’t bother to prepare for audits, but because modern enterprises manage so much data that it is difficult to identify and classify.

“There is a huge gap between the data protection officer, the chief product officer and the engineering department. They have different interests, different concerns and use different terminology,” said Uzy Hadad co-founder and CEO of Privya.

“FAANG companies have large privacy engineering teams, strong policies and proprietary technology to help them with data privacy, plus a wealth of in-house privacy architects and privacy teams to translate the legal requirements into a ticketing system and technical requirements that engineering can understand ‘ said Hadad. “And even they sometimes misunderstand privacy and incur heavy fines.”

Businesses must have the ability to analyze what types of data are collected during encryption, how it is used and, crucially, how it is stored and sent to third-party service providers.

Unfortunately, Hadad notes that most companies don’t have these capabilities because it’s incredibly difficult to find privacy architects.

The market for data protection and privacy

Privya is within the global data privacy software marketwhich researchers have estimated to be worth $1.68 billion in 2021 and projected to reach $25.85 billion by 2029 as more organizations strive to manage their compliance attitudes.

The provider competes with a range of organizations, including: OneTrustwho raised $210 million series C extension last year and raised its total funds to $920 million.

OneTrust provides a data management solution that uses AI to discover and classify personal and non-personal data, allowing users to identify it in real-time while also seeing whether their data-sharing activities comply with existing regulations.

Another major competitor is Trustarcwhich raised $70 million in funding in July 2019 as part of a Series D funding round, bringing total funding to more than $100 million.

The TrustArc Privacy Management Platform to measure risk to data, with an assessment manager, scheduler and benchmarks, risk profile and dashboard view of their compliance status.

However, Hadad says Privya’s shift-left approach sets it apart from competing solutions.

“Privya shifts privacy to the left, so it’s integrated with the development lifecycle, which lowers the cost of troubleshooting. Other solutions signal privacy issues in production as soon as they are already live,” said Hadad.