Two years after a major data compliance law went into effect in Europe, companies are still struggling with meeting data requests in a timely manner.

A recent global survey found that 58% of respondents could not meet data access and portability requests within a one-month time frame. This is in spite of data privacy regulations put in place during 2018 for the European Union and in 2019 for the state of California.

The survey cited lack of a consolidated, transparent data structure as one of the main barriers for a timely response. To address this issue, Alation Inc. and BigID announced an expanded partnership today that will integrate BigID’s data discovery with Alation’s data catalog.

“Enterprises have made huge investments in data warehouses, data marts, data lakes, all kinds of other technology infrastructure aimed at making the data easier to get to, but they’ve effectively just layered onto the problem,” said Kiran Narsu (pictured, left), vice president of business development at Alation. “BigID is the leading modern data intelligence platform for privacy, and what we’re trying to do is bring a level of integration between our two technologies so that enterprises can better manage and scale their data privacy compliance capability.”

Narsu spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by William Murphy (pictured, right), vice president of alliances and business development at BigID, and they discussed how the combined solutions of the two companies will benefit enterprise customers and continued expansion of the global regulatory landscape. (* Disclosure below.)

Safeguard privacy

BigID, which was founded four years ago when the European Union adopted the General Data Protection Regulation, uses machine learning and advanced identity intelligence to safeguard privacy. For enterprise customers, that process starts with knowing everything possible about the data they retain.

“To do anything with privacy, you have to understand where your data is, what it is, and whose it is,” Murphy said. “How companies dealt with data was changing forever. The status quo could no longer exist, so privacy was going to become a day-to-day reality for these enterprises.”

Alation’s technology leverages the data catalog as a platform for enabling search, governance and analytics. The combination of Alation’s ability to scale privacy-centric governance and automated stewardship with BigID’s discovery and insights forms the basis for the newly announced solution.

“With BigID we can now layer in a privacy-aware consumption angle,” Narsu explained. “The BigID discovery platform informs the Alation catalog of the usage capabilities of a given data set at the moment the analyst wants to conduct his or her analysis. That powerful connection has been so effective for our customers in enabling them to do analytical work that they just couldn’t dream of before.”

Notifications on the rise

Companies have struggled with meeting data compliance demands because the web of regulations is expanding and the process to fulfill requests often requires a manual search of convoluted data sets.

The pace of data breach notifications is increasing as well. One recent survey by a law firm found that organizations have made an average of 278 personal data breach notifications to European authorities per day since January of last year.

“Regulations and compliance measures both state by state and internationally are growing,” Murphy said. “Automation is a huge piece of this. We’re trying to bridge this gap between data governance and privacy.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Alation Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Alation nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE