De-identifying Analytics Data With Skyflow

Despite your best attempts at preventing it, you likely find that sensitive data ends up in your data analytics pipelines, creating security, privacy, and compliance risk.

Many of your internal systems may need access to the data, which means that siloing it off could break things down. 

When securing PII, PHI, or other forms of sensitive data, it’s tempting to want to reduce the number of internal users and systems that can access it to the bare minimum, but if you do this you’ll probably start getting angry Slack messages from teams you didn’t initially consider. You’ll realize soon enough that even analytics systems can depend on that data, even if they only need a small portion of it. 

Here are some challenges you will face when managing sensitive data going into analytics systems:

1. Sometimes data entering your analytics pipeline contains PII that your analytical systems don’t need. You need to find a way to de-identify this PII data in order to take away any risk of it being exposed.
   

2. Your analytics may need to process a limited amount of sensitive data, such as users’ age, ZIP code, or something else. In this case, you would need to be able to run operations on de-identified data. 
   

3. You might want to utilize data from the output of your analytics system, such as a set of email addresses that match users with particular characteristics. Once again, you would need to run these operations using analytical output data that has been de-identified.
   

Skyflow’s vault integrations are set up to help you manage each of these complex use cases, de-identifying data so it isn’t exposed but still giving you the ability to utilize the data without granting access to it. Skyflow will allow you to replace any sensitive data going into your analytics systems with placeholders, keeping it secure without causing issues with your internal infrastructure. 

We wrote a white paper exploring each of these challenges in detail and gives you a close look at how Skyflow’s industry-leading flexibility, governance controls, and integrations provide you with everything you need to meet this problem head-on. If you want to learn more, please read our white paper here. If you want to learn more about how Skyflow can help you get the most out of your data without compromising security, please get in touch with us.