Israeli startup MinerEye aims to help large corporates comply with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by leveraging artificial intelligence to help identify the data that needs protection under the new rules.
A new tool called DataTracker, which MinerEye released ahead of the April 16–20 RSA conference in San Francisco, is designed to automate the detection, tracking, and securing of sensitive assets, including unstructured and so-called dark data, information assets organizations collect, process and store during regular business activities, but generally fail to use for other purposes. DataTracker is mainly used for compliant cloud migration.
Companies cannot protect, manage or utilize information they can’t find, says the startup. MinerEye fuses computer vision and machine learning to track information at the byte and pixel level, which it claims no other solution has achieved.
Some 30 large corporates in the Fortune 1000 –including manufacturers, food and beverage companies and big banks — are testing the technology globally, CEO Yaniv Avidan said in an interview with The Innovator.
Recent research found that that 90 % of the data in existence today was produced in the last two years, says Avidan. “This gives you a sense of what the big problem is. Companies lose control of data as it piles up, switches hands and travels between platforms, so we thought let’s harness artificial intelligence , its compute power and accuracy to identify the crown jewels and isolate them to give companies much better security and control.”
Avidan says the application of MinerEye’s technology is much wider than compliance with GDPR legislation, which goes into effect on May 25. “GDPR is more of an opportunity for companies not just to get their data in order but to keep their private data in a much better fashion and to extract value out of it and stay ahead of the competition,” says Avidan. “It is about keeping the right data in the right places and saving a lot of costs on storage and managing the data.”
In many companies GDPR is just an issue for the legal team but it can also be “a great driver to improve the way a company deals with data and that is where we come in,” says Avidan. “Most of the companies we are in touch with are looking beyond GDPR to how they can consolidate all their data in the cloud to reduce costs and improve security. Our technology can help them make sure they are monitoring their data as it is switching hands and moving between platforms. The other use case for our technology is to make sure the amount of data is not inflating needlessly — that a company is not keeping aging data that nobody uses. Our tools can recommend to companies when to delete data and save them lots of money on storage.”
Founded in 2015 by Avidan, Avner Atias and Gideon Barak, three friends who met each other while completing their tour in the Israeli Defense Forces, the company has so far raised $4.6 million.
