Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Priyadarshi Prasad, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at LightBeam:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to your company?
A: LightBeam is a pioneer in the data privacy automation (DPA) market. Our mission is to empower organizations to manage and access their sensitive data securely. Unlike siloed solutions, we take a holistic approach to privacy where we tie identity-centric discovery & classification, data cataloging, data access, and data sharing into a unified privacy control tower. LightBeam empowers privacy and compliance executives to keep their organizations under continuous compliance, while information security executives can finally rest assured that sensitive data is being used and accessed securely.
Q: Any highlights on your recent announcement?
A: It has become nearly impossible for companies to safeguard their sensitive data given the volume, variety and velocity at which data is getting created. A legacy, manual approach is unsustainable, and is already resulting in accidental leakages and targeted breaches.
LightBeam.ai just came out of stealth on April 06th and announced the general availability of its category-defining, AI-powered, identity-centric data privacy automation platform. Unlike existing solutions that largely approach privacy from the lens of filling out lots and lots of forms, we use natural language understanding (NLU), named entity recognition (NER) and other artificial intelligence / machine learning (AI/ML) techniques to automate the mundane tasks for privacy and security officers.
One of the platform’s key innovations is LightBeam’s ability to detect fragments of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Protected Health Information (PHI) data and help privacy and security teams understand the identities (customers/patients/partners) to whom such data belongs, enabling them to automate security of all sensitive data proactively.
Recommended: Q: Can you give us more insights into your offering?
A: LightBeam supports data privacy automation holistically for both structured data (like Snowflake, Microsoft SQL Server, Amazon RDS etc.) and unstructured data (like Slack, Gdrive, Zendesk, Amazon S3 etc.). Furthermore, LightBeam approaches data privacy differently in three respects:
- Identity centric approach to privacy: One of the platform’s key innovations is LightBeam’s ability to detect fragments of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Protected Health Information (PHI) data and help privacy and security teams understand the identities (customers/patients/partners) to whom such data belongs, enabling them to automate security of all sensitive data proactively. While other tools get excited (and start throwing alerts left and right) when they detect a 9-digit number, LightBeam uses its AI/ML-stack to figure out the identity to whom such a 9-digit number belongs. The identity-centric approach helps organizations understand and protect against the real risk of sensitive data exposure, and automate their data security and privacy policies based on identities.
- Platform approach to privacy: LightBeam’s full-featured platform provides integrated detection, cataloging, anonymization, access control, and collaboration for filling out regulatory compliance documents. LightBeam approaches sensitive data management as a connected continuous automation process. Organizations not only save time and money with this approach, they also get a more seamless and secure environment protective of their customers’ privacy.
- Natively built for automation from the ground up – LightBeam’s self-learning capability provides nearly 100% accuracy when detecting sensitive data and associating them with identities. LightBeam builds on top of that accuracy to automate compliance, including automatically deleting/redacting messages with sensitive customer information from tools like Slack and Zendesk; automatically cataloging and redacting sensitive information from databases like Postgres and SQL Server; and automatically creating a 360-view of all sensitive information an organization might be carrying about a consumer to enable 1-click data subject access request (DSAR) response.
Current privacy tools in the market shy away from automation because automation requires a high degree of precision, whereas our high level of accuracy enables us to automate with confidence. Most other tools also provide siloed solutions, leading to additional complexity in customers’ environments.
Q: What can we expect from your company in the next 6 months? What are your plans?
A: In the next six months, the LightBeam team will be focused on introducing more customers and partners to a better, more secure and automated way of managing data privacy. We are growing our team with people who are passionate about data privacy automation both on the engineering and on the go-to-market side.
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Q: What is the best thing about your company that people might not know about?
A: Many of the questions we get reflect customers’ experience with the current state of available solutions which invariably are described by customers as complex to set up, and time-intensive to manage. Privacy management has continued to be manual and error prone unfortunately, as evidenced by frequent sensitive information leakages. LightBeam has brought automation to enable frictionless yet secure exchange of data between businesses and their consumers. With a set-up that takes minutes (not months), agentless approach to data intelligence and our guarantee to keep customers’ data in their own environments (vs. taking it out for processing), LightBeam has earned trust of its customers within a very short period of time.
