Sean Falconer

Stop Making Your Data Team the 'Data Police'

When was the last time you performed a mathematical operation on an email address? Or multiplied a credit card number by a passport number? It's absurd, this would be an insane thing to do, yet we keep storing sensitive customer information in our data warehouses, risking PII exposure, as if we need to perform operations like this. This forces our data teams to act as data police, controlling access—a job that's the definition of “not fun” and quickly becomes unmanageable. Companies are then faced with the difficult choice of either locking down all access or granting over-privileged access, neither of which is ideal. But what if there's a better way? In this talk, we'll explore how leading tech companies with the largest amount of customer data solve this problem. We'll look at the architectural patterns they use to balance data security and usability, and how these solutions can free our data teams from their policing duties.