NATIONAL HARBOR, MD — Commvault continued its diversification of its product offerings around its data platform strategy, introducing at its Commvault GO event here both a new analytics strategy, and its first application under that strategy, a data privacy option designed to help address the challenge of meeting the requirements of Europe’s upcoming General Data Protection Regulation.

Matt Tyrer, solutions marketing manager for North America at Commvault, said the company’s approach to analytics is to “provide the easy button” for top analytics opportunities, based on its position as the developer of the data repository to provide “information about the information.”

The company’s new data privacy application is aimed squarely at GDPR, which looms large in the subject of data governance due to its arrival date just over six months from now. But the company says it will also help enterprises meet the requirements of other data governance, compliance, and privacy legislations elsewhere, both those already in place and those yet to come to the fore.

The software will detect personally identifiable information on both covered file systems and endpoints devices, map where that information is located, create automated workflows to address customer requests to know what a company knows about them, or to be “forgotten” from the records if needed, and to produce audit trails of the management of such data.k

By creating a common framework, Tyrer said the company is helping customers to alleviate the first and perhaps most important step in compliance with regulations like GDPR — understanding just what the requirements are.

“If you ask five people what GDPR is, you’ll get five different interpretations of the ruleset. People genuinely don’t have a common perspective despite the fact that the rules are there and well-defined,” Tyrer said. “We try to take some of that uncertainty away, and provide that easy button, because we have access to all the data, and can provide a toolset to intelligently act on it.”

Tyrer said the partner opportunity around compliance issues like GDPR is a consultative one, and urged partners to get into the game quickly as known and trusted entities to their customers, positing that over the next months, we’ll likely see new and unproven organizations come into the market claiming to be GDPR consultants in the way that new players appeared with questionable pedigrees at the height of the Y2K panic.

“We’ve got a real toolset for partners to go into their customers with something that can really deliver on compliance,” Tyrer said. “We don’t give you GDPR compliance out of the box, but our partners can see so much data, and so much data about the data, that it becomes a single pane of glass to find what you need for compliance.”

The company has said that beyond GDPR, it will continue to offer more analytics applications over the next 18 months, but Tyrer stressed that it developing its own analytics offerings will not in any way limit third party partners — both ISVs and solution providers — from also building their own analytics offerings on top of the Commvault stack.

“We’ll build things — good things — but we won’t stop people from building their own things as well,” he said.