Protegrity CTO and data security expert Ulf Mattsson featured in recent post on One Million by One Million blog. In her recent post, “Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ulf Mattsson, CTO of Protegrity,” Sramana Mitra profiles Protegrity CTO Ulf Mattsson and gets his thoughts on the state of Big Data security today.

1. Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ulf Mattsson, CTO of Protegrity (Part 1)
By Sramana Mitra, One Million by One Million Blog
Big Data platforms like Hortonworks and Cloudera use a third party player to address security
issues. Protegrity offers one of those key building blocks of a secure Big Data platform. This
interview delves into the security issues that customers are grappling with.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to
Protegrity.
Ulf Mattsson: I’m the Chief Technology Officer at Protegrity. A little bit about my background,
I worked for 20 years at IBM in software development and database security. I left IBM over a
decade ago to design the Protegrity database security product and
to integrate with the leading databases from IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft. I’m a master of more
than 20 issued US patents in the area of data-centric security. I also worked with research groups
and standard bodies like the payment card industry security standard council and American
National Standards Institute to create industry standards.
Protegrity’s products were born to meet stringent privacy requirements. Our early customers
include credit card brands, banks, and global beverage companies. These early customers wanted
to protect information about their clients, business deals, employees, and different types of
proprietary information like secret beverage formulas. The core architecture of our platform is
based on a hub and spoke topology with a single point of control for security policy definition
and distributed policy enforcement that is very close to the data stores. You get performance and
scalability.
This new design delivered a new kind of security that is quick to meet the challenge of modern
enterprises in the security field. With this kind of architecture, you can efficiently store and
manipulate massive amounts of data while achieving compliance. It works for your legacy
systems. Currently, we protect sensitive data for the world’s largest companies and we enable
compliance across different areas like the payment card industry, personally identifiable
information (PII), and also for protected health information (PHI).
As a company, our singular focus is to develop and deliver solutions that protect data throughout
the lifecycle, from acquiring data all the way to archiving, without getting in the way of business.
Our company is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut and Protegrity has a European office in
London and a partner office in Mumbai, India. We have research and development facilities here
in the United States, Sweden, India, and China.
Sramana Mitra: If you were to look at your dominant customer segment, what kinds of
customers are using your technology more than others?
Ulf Mattsson: Our customers typically need to be compliant to different regulations or they have
other reasons to protect sensitive information. It’s typically large retailers and, very often,

2. international companies in the financial industry, insurance industry, healthcare, banks, and
transportation.
This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ulf Mattsson, CTO of
Protegrity