Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ulf Mattsson, CTO of Protegrity (Part 1)

Big Data platforms like Hortonworks and Cloudera use a third party player to address security issues. Protegrity offers one of those key building blocks of a secure Big Data platform. This interview delves into the security issues that customers are grappling with.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Protegrity.

Ulf Mattsson: I’m the Chief Technology Officer at Protegrity. A little bit about my background, I worked for 20 years at IBM in software development and database security. I left IBM over a decade ago to design the Protegrity database security product and

to integrate with the leading databases from IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft. I’m a master of more than 20 issued US patents in the area of data-centric security. I also worked with research groups and standard bodies like the payment card industry security standard council and American National Standards Institute to create industry standards.

Protegrity’s products were born to meet stringent privacy requirements. Our early customers include credit card brands, banks, and global beverage companies. These early customers wanted to protect information about their clients, business deals, employees, and different types of proprietary information like secret beverage formulas. The core architecture of our platform is based on a hub and spoke topology with a single point of control for security policy definition and distributed policy enforcement that is very close to the data stores. You get performance and scalability.

This new design delivered a new kind of security that is quick to meet the challenge of modern enterprises in the security field. With this kind of architecture, you can efficiently store and manipulate massive amounts of data while achieving compliance. It works for your legacy systems. Currently, we protect sensitive data for the world’s largest companies and we enable compliance across different areas like the payment card industry, personally identifiable information (PII), and also for protected health information (PHI).

As a company, our singular focus is to develop and deliver solutions that protect data throughout the lifecycle, from acquiring data all the way to archiving, without getting in the way of business. Our company is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut and Protegrity has a European office in London and a partner office in Mumbai, India. We have research and development facilities here in the United States, Sweden, India, and China.

Sramana Mitra: If you were to look at your dominant customer segment, what kinds of customers are using your technology more than others?

Ulf Mattsson: Our customers typically need to be compliant to different regulations or they have other reasons to protect sensitive information. It’s typically large retailers and, very often, international companies in the financial industry, insurance industry, healthcare, banks, and transportation.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ulf Mattsson, CTO of Protegrity
1 2 3 4 5