Data privacy and governance software firm Data Discovery Solutions Ltd., which does business as ActiveNav, has announced a new “data mapping-as-a-service” tool for companies that need to keep an up-to-date inventory of all of the sensitive information stored on their systems.

Announced today, ActiveNav’s new Inventory service is said to be able to generate comprehensive data maps within minutes and make them accessible via pre-populated pulldown menus to support compliance requests such as Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation and the California Privacy Rights Act.

Using the service, organizations can discover, map and monitor user-generated data across applications such as Microsoft SharePoint and Teams, plus various email, chat and social media platforms. Once the map is complete, it’s possible to create a compliance risk profile on that dataset using customizable, pre-built rules that can prioritize and highlight any possible hotspots in an organization’s data universe. The service applies artificial intelligence to ensure the data maps stay current too, so companies can maintain an accurate and holistic view of their data risk profile.

ActiveNav says this kind of service is helpful because data mapping has traditionally been a cumbersome process requiring regular manual intervention. Data mapping-as-a-service transforms this into a persistent, always-on approach that’s able to monitor a company’s compliance risk in real-time.

Eric Derk, Ernst and Young LLP’s managing director of forensics, said data mapping has become a fundamental concept of many legal and compliance routines.

“Besides the wasted time spent creating and maintaining manual, static maps, there is a high cost of human resources and risk of error associated with this approach,” he said. “Siloed methods do not provide holistic, up-to-date views of an entire data universe, and unknowingly put organizations at risk, resulting in a false sense of security that leaves them vulnerable to breaches and the resulting exfiltration of sensitive data.”

ActivNav founder and Chief Executive Peter Baumann reckons that historical data mapping efforts have failed and believes the area is in desperate need of a reboot.

“Privacy and compliance teams are fooling themselves into believing they have the right solutions for discovering sensitive data, but they often don’t know what data they should be protecting and how they should protect it,” he said. “Inventory shines a light on the problem in an automated, persistent way.”

Ensuring compliance has never been more important, either. Data privacy laws such as the CPRA and similar new regulations in Colorado and Virginia have only made life more difficult for organizations that do business in the U.S., for example.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE it was only a matter of time before the “as a service” trend reached into the area of data management. He said there are some good arguments for data mapping as-a-service though, as it helps to bridge the variety of data sources and multiple systems that enterprises use.

“Whether or not DMaaS emerges as a successful new category remains to be seen, as it will likely require more vendors to get in on it, but this is a promising start,” Mueller said.

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