Client Success: Media and Tech Firm Automates Data Governance, Compliance to Improve CX

This story is part of our client success series. It showcases Fortune 100 and 500 customers across various industries that turned to Privacera to solve their tough data security, access, and governance challenges. Check out all the stories in this series.  

With millions of subscribers and customers worldwide, this global media and technology company has a goldmine of client and usage data. The data comes from its diverse offerings, including high-speed internet, video, voice, wireless, security and automation services, and even theme parks. Because of its worldwide presence, its businesses comply with strict federal, state and foreign laws and regulations related to data privacy and handling personal data. 

As a part of a new business initiative, the company wanted to improve its customer experience (CX), marketing, and operations, but soon realized major data governance challenges. Its manual approach to translate its data governance policies to its big data applications proved overly complex and didn’t scale with demand. Read the story to learn how this company was able to maintain consistent compliance and governance, and automate its policies, across its existing infrastructure from the Privacera platform.

Business Risks

This media and technology company can’t afford to miss a step in securing its data. It’s governed heavily by:

• International data security and privacy laws, including European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the United Kingdom’s Data Protection Act 2018
• Federal regulations imposed by the United States Communications Act and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)
• State laws around consumer privacy protections, data security, and security breach notification 

The restrictions include non-consensual collection of personally identifiable information (PII) and disclosure to third parties. Also, the company must also undergo regular reviews of new and evolving technologies, as well as content and advertising delivery methods. 

This client’s data includes confidential, proprietary, and personal information about customers, employees, and vendors. Failure to comply with the regulations would expose this data and the company to a potential data breach and stiff penalties. The risk could significantly impact the company’s business, reputation, and operations. To avoid these risks, the customer implemented stringent data security and data minimization requirements.

Business Issues

As this project evolved, this company migrated its structured and unstructured data from its on-premises databases and data warehouses to an on-premises Hadoop environment. It then migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to achieve greater elasticity, accelerated microservices development, and reduced infrastructure management. From a business perspective, it turned to the cloud for its flexibility and efficiency in onboarding data and providing data access. 

However, before rolling out its AWS instances, the company needed to ensure it could govern its data effectively to ensure it met all regulations for data collection and handling. This made governance a critical element of its big data strategy and practice. This company also determined it needed centralized, granular control over who can access and use what data, how, and when. 

To solve its data governance problems, the company started translating its data governance policies into its big data applications. Its initial approach focused on creating policy control layers to manage access to specific database layers within their AWS infrastructure. However, this approach proved overly complex and didn’t scale with demand.

Solution

For this reason, the company turned to Privacera. From the Privacera unified data security governance platform, this client was able to manage governance policies across all applications. It even gained the ability to control data access down to individual database rows and columns. 

This client was already familiar with the Apache Ranger framework, which Privacera is based on, because its earlier on-premises instances were Hadoop-based. By using Privacera, this client could extend its existing Ranger foundation to the cloud as a unified solution across its environments. In addition, because Privacera integrates with tools, such as Databricks, Amazon EMR, Kafka, and Presto, this client could build an enterprise-grade solution that supports a broad base of big data analytics capabilities while ensuring consistent security and governance.

Business Impact

With Privacera, the customer achieved concrete business value.

Internal and Regulatory Compliance 

Needing to manage data access, privacy, and sharing, this client’s business teams and data owners could set their own rules for how others in the organization could view and use the data. The fine-grained access control enabled them to establish criteria by groups, roles, and data classification. By adopting Privacera to unify governance across its on-premises and cloud environments, the company enabled an analytics foundation for data initiatives throughout the company.  

Customer-360 Approach to Marketing and Ad Sales

With fine-grained access control and governance over its diverse data types, this client has enabled data democratization across the organization. Employees can now access data more easily to cross-market offerings based on customer behavior across its services. It can even offer personalized content recommendations on its streaming, cable TV, and pay-per-view services for multi-service product bundles. Similarly, the company’s ad sales teams can target local and national ads more effectively to deliver greater value for customers and marketers.

Optimized Operations for an Improved Customer Experience

Infrastructure performance is critical for delivering a good customer experience. As part of its ongoing investment in digitalization, this company built new capabilities to predict outages, troubleshoot service problems, and ensure consistent availability. With the governance layer, the operations teams have access to more detailed customer data, such as individual MAC addresses, than would be appropriate for other teams, such as marketing. This way, the company can leverage the full value of its data without compromising customer privacy. 

No matter how unique your data ecosystem, products, and processes are, Privacera can help future-proof your data security, access, and governance for greater scalability, connectivity, and competitive opportunities. 

Learn more in the ebook How to Drive Data Value and Innovation with Unified Data Security Governance. Read the ebook.