Titus believes their new privacy solution will make it easier for partners to have broader conversations with customers than in the past.
Titus Accelerator for Privacy flagging personal data in an email
Ottawa-based data classification vendor Titus has announced Titus Accelerator for Privacy, a new solution which leverages artificial intelligence and container to automatically identify personal data This enables that data to be protected, satisfying regulatory requirements and reducing financial and legal risk exposure.
This offering continues the thrust of Titus’ business since its December 2017 acquisition by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities. Blackstone’s premise was that data identification and classification was going to become more important in the data protection market, with the growth of compliance measures like the GDPR in the EU and the impending CCPA in California. Since then, improving ways to identify and classify data has been a top priority.
“It’s also evolutionary for us when we look at our history as a company,” said Mark Cassetta, Titus’ senior vice president of strategy, who has been there for seven years, growing up with the business. He is responsible for customer success and strategic partnerships, and has a line into product strategy. “We were founded on the principle of needing to derive the context of data so we can decide how to protect it. To do that, we wound up defining a labeling solution at the point of creation.”
The solution was subsequently expanded as organizations wanted to use it for data classification, and more automation was brought into the mix. Titus also added support for broader data protection. Support for privacy has also been there in the past. Titus Accelerator for Privacy is intended to raise it to a new level, however.
“The idea of privacy is not new, but its impact at a global level has started to hit centre stage,” Casseta said. “Our solution is based on the premise that privacy goes beyond credit card and medical information. The question we asked is how we can best detect if there is personal information. in order to protect it. So we looked at how to make our detection capabilities that much better.”
Titus did this by leveraging AI and container technology in the Accelerator for Privacy.
“This product has been built using AI-trained learning for the detection of personal information,” Casseca stated. “It’s a prebuilt toolset that allows customers to detect the whole set of personal data. The APIs we have put around our policy engine lets us read things generated by AI. This detection mechanism is the core of the product, which will accelerate privacy outcomes.”
The detection model sits in a Docker container.
“It is trained to look for personal information,” Casseta said. “Every piece of personal information is detected, so it doesn’t leave the organization. The major uplift for us here is in the container and detection capabilities. However, in addition to the detection, it also uplevels our architecture to be more extensible from a policy point of view.”
The automation the Accelerator for Privacy provides changes both the process of both defining and executing data classification, Casseta stated.
“Seven years ago, our tagline was ‘user driven security,’” he said. Now we are removing users from having to be part of that decision, by reducing human involvement as much as possible to reduce human error. At higher levels, we have really removed the need to have a deep data classification conversation, that requires many stakeholders in the business, and could take years to align on a taxonomy.”
Titus has been moving towards a 100 per cent channel model, and the new solution, which is available today, is sold and supported through their channel worldwide. It can be deployed as a standalone solution or as part of an end-to-end data privacy solution set, which also includes data loss prevention, CASBs and next-gen firewalls.
“The add-on to the solution set is more likely to appeal to our existing customer base,” Casseta noted.
Casseta sees Accelerator for Privacy as a major new asset for their channel, on multiple levels.
“Like us, our partners have been going through their own cloud evolution, and are adopting more technologies using things like containers,” he said. “The way that we have architected this with Docker and set it up to scale with Kubernetes – that’s a great opportunity to support customers that goes beyond a security conversation, and into enterprise managed services down the road. One of the biggest barriers to entry for data classification is having to build a data classification taxonomy. This solution means you don’t have to do that. It makes it much easier for the channel to have a conversation about customer identity.”
