Information safety startup Anonos raises $50M for PII anonymization

For all too many organizations, processing buyer information has develop into as a lot a authorized legal responsibility as it’s an asset. Whereas gathering and processing personally identifiable info (PII) will help unlock new insights, it additionally leaves the door open to pricey compliance liabilities. That’s, until a corporation has an answer to anonymize it. 

Information safety supplier Anonos, which right this moment introduced it has raised $50 million in development financing from Aon and GT Funding Companions, has tried to handle these challenges by constructing a platform to obfuscate PII. 

Anonos’ Information Embassy answer makes use of a mix of statutory pseudonymization, artificial information and different computation methods to defend prospects’ identities by unlinking private information from direct and oblique identifiers, such because the person’s identify or deal with. 

This method goals to steadiness information utility and safety issues, to make sure that enterprises can course of PII for information analytics, synthetic intelligence and machine studying functions with out violating rules such because the Common Information Safety Regulation (GDPR) and Schrems II. 

Surviving information safety perils by de-identifying 

The announcement comes as organizations have discovered it more and more difficult to course of and collect insights from their information with out falling afoul of knowledge safety rules.

Some of the notable examples of this occurred earlier this yr when Meta warned it could be pressured to withdraw its providers from Europe resulting from uncertainty over the legality of EU-U.S. information transfers. 

Within the present regulatory local weather, any publicity of PII information could be extraordinarily financially damaging, as Morgan Stanley Smith Barney discovered after receiving a positive of $35 million for failing to correctly eliminate PII information from roughly 15 million prospects.

Increasingly more organizations are discovering that accumulating and processing PII to generate insights considerably will increase authorized danger. 

“Information-driven enterprises haven’t been ready to make use of their information belongings to their fullest benefit due to privateness and safety restrictions,” stated Gary LaFever, co-CEO and common counsel of Anonos. 

Nonetheless, by eradicating potential identifiers from PII, organizations can proceed to acquire correct insights from complete datasets whereas guaranteeing that information can’t be relinked to a person person’s id or system. 

To this goal, instruments like Information Embassy present a mechanism for de-identifying private information in order that enterprises can course of it in a approach that’s compliant with worldwide information safety rules.  

“Different distributors have tried to resolve this subject, however we imagine Anonos’ 10 years of R&D on Information Embassy is game-changing for organizations that rely on accessible but compliant and uninterrupted information provide chains,” LaFever stated. “The know-how’s 26 granted worldwide patents and greater than 70 further patent belongings function the spine of this financing that takes us to a brand new degree of enterprise execution.” 

A take a look at the information safety market and de-identification providers 

The information safety market has grown quickly ever because the GDPR got here into impact in 2018, with researchers valuing it at $49.72 billion in 2016 and projecting it would attain $119.95 billion by 2022. 

It’s price noting that Anonos isn’t the one supplier providing enterprises information de-identification capabilities. 

Google Cloud Information Loss Prevention (Cloud DLP) allows organizations to create an automatic information transformation pipeline to establish delicate information by using de-identification methods like tokenization and pseudonymization. Google Cloud additionally introduced income of over $6 billion earlier this yr. 

One other supplier making an attempt to handle this problem is IBM. IBM InfoSphere Optim Information Privateness makes use of a spread of transformation methods to masks and obfuscate PII, and integrates with the Info Governance Catalog to offer 30 out-of-the-box information classifications and 30 information privateness guidelines. 

IBM just lately introduced $15.5 billion in income throughout the second quarter of 2022.