In less than a month, the California Consumer Privacy Act takes effect. The new law regulates the handling of customer information by businesses and imposes fines on those firms that fail to comply.

California’s new law, which applies to any company with more than $25 million in annual gross revenue, has businesses scrambling to locate and catalog sensitive information. This has opened a prime market opportunity for Io-Tahoe LLC, which specializes in using machine-learning algorithms to track personally identifiable information.

“We tie data to lines of regulation,” said Lester Waters (pictured, right), chief information security officer of Io-Tahoe. “Using the Io-Tahoe software, I’m able to catalog all of that. I’m able to garner insights into that data using the nine patent pending algorithms that we have to do intelligent tagging.”

Waters spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren), during the recent AWS re:Invent event in Las Vegas. He was joined by Ajay Vohora (pictured, left), chief executive officer of Io-Tahoe, and they discussed how the company uses machine learning to thoroughly catalog organizational data and the value businesses can derive from implementing information discovery tools. (* Disclosure below.)

Identifying data relationships

Io-Tahoe’s platform allows organizations to search and discover data across traditional databases and cloud repositories. Its machine-learning algorithms enable customers to increase the speed of learning data relationships throughout the business environment.

“Large enterprises that we were working with, like General Electric and Comcast, helped us come out of stealth in 2017 and gave us a great story of solving petabyte scale data challenges using machine learning,” Vohora said. “Automation has got to be the way forward.”

Io-Tahoe commissioned a study with Forrester Research Inc. to evaluate the return-on-investment that organizations might expect from dealing with foundational data discovery. Not surprisingly, the results showed a significant return for users, and that’s before new regulations, such as the California law, take effect.

“Business value insights are so important these days for companies,” Waters said. “A lot of companies compete on very thin margins and having insights into their data and the way that customers can use their data can make or break a company.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS re:Invent event. (* Disclosure: Io-Tahoe LLC sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Io-Tahoe nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE