LightBeam launches data privacy automation platform to streamline compliance

Data privacy automation company LightBeam.ai has launched a new AI-powered data privacy automation platform designed to help organizations streamline compliance. LightBeam said its new offering takes an identity-centric approach to allow customers to automate compliance against a patchwork of existing and emerging privacy regulations such as GDPR, CPRA, HIPAA and PCI DSS. The platform will be officially unveiled at the IAPP Global Privacy Summit 2022 in Washington, April 11-13.

Platform seeks to replace ineffective manual compliance processes

The trifecta of ubiquitous data collection, universal access, and uninhibited sharing makes it nearly impossible for companies to safeguard their sensitive data from accidental leakages and targeted breaches, the firm stated in a press release. What’s more, a fast-evolving privacy regulatory environment has spawned a plethora of manual compliance processes that are inefficient and ineffective in addressing the associated regulatory and reputational risks, it added.

LightBeam said it aims to foster autonomous privacy management by tying together discovery, cataloguing, access controls, and data loss prevention with the ability to detect fragments of personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI) data. This will help privacy and security teams understand the identities to whom data belongs, enabling them to automate security of all sensitive data proactively, it stated.

Compliance consolidation key but technically challenging

“The explosion of data, hybrid work, and risk has left organizations struggling to effectively manage their data from a risk and privacy compliance perspective. Unfortunately, businesses find themselves having to adhere to disparate regulations, which is confusing, manual, and often expensive,” commented Ryan O’Leary, Esq., research manager, privacy and legal technology at IDC. “A data discovery and governance first approach can help businesses lay the foundation of data privacy management. This approach also enables automation and helps them adhere to current and future regulations efficiently.”

The new platform consolidates the compliance processes required at each stage of business, Lightbeam stated. “As a data-driven enterprise becomes a necessary reality, it brings with it hard-to-manage fragmentation, complexity, and distribution across structured and unstructured data,” commented Bhaskar Ghosh, Partner at 8VC. “Making discovery, compliance, and governance work in this scenario with a rich and nuanced identity-centric view is necessary, but technically very challenging.”