Data storage used to be a haphazard matter, with companies unconcerned about what data they held or where it was kept. Then, high-profile breaches brought attention to just how much private and sensitive data companies held.

Governments acted, passing legislation such as the European General Data Protection Regulation and California’s Consumer Privacy Act in an effort to safeguard customer’s privacy and establish data ownership rules.

“Regulations like GDPR and CCPA forced companies to rethink their approach to data understanding [and] data knowledge because part of the core assumption of [data] privacy is that you and I and other individuals have a right to our data,” said Dimitri Sirota (pictured), chief executive officer of BigID Inc.

Sirota spoke with John Walls, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s livestreaming studio, for an exclusive CUBE Conversation in anticipation of the AWS Startup Showcase Event: Innovators in Cloud Data, which kicks off on March 24. (* Disclosure below.)

Find your data

When the requests to delete, give back or otherwise manage specific customer data started to come in, organizations were stumped. With no idea where data was or how to find it, they struggled to comply. And because it had never been needed before, there was no technology available to help.

Seeing a market opportunity in the problem, BigID was created to give organizations visibility into data assets, whether in the cloud or the data center.

“We provide a multidimensional view of your data to understand the content and the context of the information,” Sirota stated. This eases compliance with data regulations, identifies potential security risks and helps companies derive that all-important value from their data.

Regulation causes a flurry of consternation among companies, with billions of dollars spent on compliance. The shift to cloud, now accelerated by the COVID pandemic, also raised companies awareness of the need to understand and safeguard data.

“You move it into the cloud and data becomes the perimeter,” Sirota stated. “It’s kind of naked and exposed out there.”

Gaining visibility into stored data is about more than compliance. Avoidable data breaches have cost companies almost $1.3 billion in fines since data regulations came into force. Bigger ongoing costs come in the shape of lost customer trust and brand reputation.

“The first rule of fight club is that to solve a problem, you need to know the problem. You can’t fix what you can’t find,” Sirota said. “You need to know that you have passwords in a certain datastore and there’s no security around that. Because unless you know that first, there’s no ability for you to solve it.”

BigID was designed from the ground up to identify these potential risk points, pinpointing not only the main issue, but sweeping around it for additional levels of exposure.

“Do you have access control around that data for instance?” Sirota said. “If that data is open to the world and you just put a bunch of passwords there, or API keys, or credentials, that’s a problem.”

Action your data

Today data is everywhere, and so, of course, is BigID. The platform provides petabyte-scale data coverage across almost any data source, cloud, or pipeline.

“It’s important for us to be where our customers are,” Sirota said.

And where a lot of those customers are is with Amazon Web Services Inc. BigID has built a wide range of capabilities and expertise around the broader AWS platform. “We can help you whether you keep your data in [Amazon] S3, whether you keep it in Dynamo[DB], whether you keep it in Elastic MapReduce, Relational Database Service, Aurora, Athena … the list goes on and on,” Sirota stated.

Another differentiator of BigID is that unlike traditional data discovery classification tools, which made fixing problems someone else’s problem, BigID is a platform where users have access to applications for encryption, access control, remediation, breach impact analysis, and other security and compliance actions.

“Part of the value and virtue of our platform is that we both help you identify the potential risk points and then we give you, in the form of apps that sit on top of our platform, ways to take action on it, to secure it, to reduce it, to minimize the risk,” Sirota said.

These apps come from both BigID and third parties, and Sirota hints at some big announcements coming shortly, promising “more and more apps in the field of privacy, in the fields of data security or protection, and even the fields of data value,” he said. “We want to be that expert partner for you to help you know your data, and then tend to [and] take action on your data.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations, and watch theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase Event: Innovators in Cloud Data. (* Disclosure: BigID Inc. sponsored this CUBE Conversation. Neither BigID nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE