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 3)
By Sramana Mitra, One Million by One Million Blog
Ulf Mattsson: Let’s look at another interesting use case. It’s a travel product company. It’s an
airline-owned company in the US that is providing ticket distribution and financial settlements
for 135 airlines and 23,000 travel agents. They have more than $65 billion per year in settlement.
Their primary issue was to protect sensitive customer data and payment data. It’s a challenge
when you have these different varieties of data. They’re looking for a solution that can fit the
requirement, be flexible, and not disrupt their business processes. They also choose this new type
of protection called data tokenization. These are three interesting use cases of our technology.
Sramana Mitra: Who are the competitors that you see in these large accounts? Ulf
Mattsson: The competitors are large companies that have a great variety of products but they are
not focused on the type of data protection that we provide. Then you have smaller, niche
companies that are providing maybe one type of encryption or one type of
tokenization. Protegrity differentiates from other security providers in basically five different
areas. First, we are protecting the entire data flow. When an attacker is attacking your data, the
entire data flow is protected. We have the flexibility to protect PII data and more use cases. If
you look at the way that we protect data, we have more levels of protection and different levels
of granularity. We can protect the data at a cell level, at a file level, or at a volume level. In
different parts of your systems, you may want to use these different approaches for different
types of data. I think the fourth is that we provide a variety of protection methods. We can
encrypt, tokenize, mask, or hash the data depending on your use case. The last one is that we
provide broad platform coverage from mainframes, Big Data, legacy systems. We can
accommodate these different platforms, applications, and databases. Sramana Mitra: I’m going
to ask you to put on your industry thought leadership hat. Tell me more about what you
see around? What are the trends of the industry? What are you anticipating? What are
some open problems out there? Ulf Mattsson: I want to say that what we repeatedly see in the
industry is that Big Data is getting traction. We’re seeing how Big Data is used. Reports are
saying that it’s used, in half of the cases, for customer-centric outcomes. We’ve seen that 94%
are actually using this analysis to identify new revenue sources. It’s a very exciting area. Then
you have other uses like operational improvement, financial and risk management, and employee
collaboration.
This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ulf Mattsson, CTO of
Protegrity