Business intelligence has become essential to how organizations make decisions. Leaders rely on data to understand customers, identify trends, improve operations and guide strategy.
But the same data that creates valuable insight can also create serious risk.
Many business intelligence and analytics initiatives depend on data sets that include confidential, sensitive or regulated information. That may include personally identifiable information, Social Security numbers, protected health information, payment data, employee records, customer identifiers and other sensitive fields.
In many cases, those sensitive data elements are not part of the final insight. They are simply needed to connect, organize or correlate information across multiple systems.
That creates a difficult challenge: How can organizations share data intelligence without sharing the sensitive data behind it?
That is where OnData can help.
The Challenge: Insight Requires Data, But Data Creates Risk
Organizations often need to combine information from multiple data sources to generate meaningful analytics. For example, a business may need to analyze customer preferences across several systems. To connect those records, the organization may use a sensitive identifier, such as a Social Security number, customer ID, account number or other unique field.
The final business value may come from the trend: what customers prefer, how they behave, what services they use or where opportunities exist.
But the sensitive identifier used to build that analysis should not be broadly exposed.
This creates several common pain points:
- Analysts need enough data to build accurate reports and insights.
- Sensitive information may be included in the data set but not needed in the final output.
- Business intelligence and data warehouse environments are often accessed by broader groups of users.
- Anonymization can require additional time, resources and manual effort.
- Sensitive data may be exposed to analysts, vendors or other users before it is anonymized.
- IT teams are often asked to create separate protected data sets for each reporting need.
- Compliance teams must ensure regulated data is not shared with users who do not have a need to know.
As analytics programs grow, these challenges become harder to manage.
Why Traditional Anonymization Falls Short
Anonymizing data can help reduce exposure, but it often introduces new complexity.
Many anonymization processes require IT teams to create new versions of data sets before business users can begin analysis. That takes time. It also creates additional data management work, version control issues and ongoing maintenance.
There is another problem: Sensitive data may still be visible during the preparation process. The analysts, developers or third-party resources involved in creating the anonymized result may have access to confidential or regulated information they should not be able to see.
That means the organization may still carry risk before the data ever reaches the final report.
For many businesses, the goal should not be to manually create protected data sets after the fact. The goal should be to protect sensitive data automatically, consistently and before it is exposed.
How OnData Helps
The OnData platform helps organizations prepare data for business intelligence and analytics without unnecessarily exposing confidential or regulated information.
OnData provides automated options for identifying, categorizing, encrypting and masking sensitive data used by existing BI/DW and analytics tools. The platform is designed to work with current technology environments, helping organizations protect data without forcing teams to rebuild their reporting architecture.
With OnData, organizations can protect sensitive fields before data is loaded into a business intelligence or data warehouse environment. They also can dynamically encrypt or mask sensitive data when it is requested by a user, ensuring the data is protected before it is displayed.
That means data consumers can continue using existing analytics tools while OnData helps enforce need-to-know access to sensitive information.
Protect the Sensitive Data, Preserve the Insight
OnData helps organizations separate the value of the insight from the risk of the underlying sensitive data.
For example, an organization may need to correlate records across systems using a confidential identifier. With OnData, that identifier can be encrypted, de-identified or masked in a way that supports analytics workflows without exposing the original value to users who do not have permission to see it.
This allows teams to continue building reports, dashboards and analytical models from existing data sets while reducing the risk of sensitive data exposure.
OnData can help protect data such as:
- Personally identifiable information.
- Protected health information.
- Payment card information.
- Criminal justice information.
- Employee records.
- Customer identifiers.
- Financial data.
- Other confidential or regulated business information.
Reducing the Burden on IT and Compliance Teams
Without automated data protection, IT teams often have to create separate data sets, reporting views or manual masking processes for each analytics use case. That slows down delivery and increases operational overhead.
OnData helps reduce that burden by applying protection at the field level and supporting automated data governance across existing systems and tools.
With OnData, organizations can:
- Share business intelligence without broadly exposing sensitive data.
- Reduce the need to create duplicate protected data sets.
- Support analysts with useful data while limiting access to raw confidential values.
- Strengthen compliance with privacy and data security requirements.
- Reduce risk in BI/DW and analytics environments.
- Improve governance over who can access sensitive information.
- Enable faster analytics delivery with less manual intervention from IT.
A Smarter Way to Share Data Intelligence
Organizations should not have to choose between valuable insight and responsible data protection.
Business teams need access to analytics. Analysts need data that supports accurate reporting. Compliance and security teams need confidence that sensitive information is not being exposed to users without a legitimate need to know.
OnData helps bring those priorities together.
By integrating with existing business intelligence and analytical technology tools, OnData allows organizations to protect confidential and regulated data while still making data insights available to the people who need them.
The result is a more secure, efficient and scalable approach to analytics.
With OnData, organizations can share the intelligence in their data without sharing the sensitive data itself.
