If you were to ask someone to describe privacy compliance, odds are the word "complex" would be tossed around. Organizations have to comply with different privacy rules that each have their own compliance requirements, and to help adhere to those laws, those companies will have hundreds of tech solutions to choose from.

BigID Vice President of Technological Alliances William Murphy and TrustArc Senior Vice President of Product and Engineering Michael Lin both know about the challenges of navigating the privacy landscape and how helpful it would be for privacy professionals to simplify their tasks.

Those challenges were the prime driver behind a new partnership between TrustArc and BigID.

Lin said the partnership uses both platforms to help with two elements of privacy compliance. The first allows the platforms to work in tandem to help organizations visualize the data they are using, identify systems with data elements to build out a data inventory, generate records of processing, analyze data risk, and provide step-by-step data compliance directions.

"That process is extremely complicated for customers," Lin said. "BigID really simplifies that by bringing real-time data on what data they are using and where is it and then we complement that from a TrustArc perspective by helping our customers understand what is going on with your data, what you need to do about it and what different types of remediation actions should you take to help yourself comply."

The platform integration is also designed to help organizations with data subject requests.

"When a request comes in to TrustArc, we can do a real-time lookup, leveraging the BigID (application programming interfaces) to see exactly where all the subject’s data is sitting within the enterprise," Lin said. "It’s a big time saver and provides automation capabilities for our customers who struggle with the processing and time constraints of (DSRs)." 

Lin added these features will be offered to the tech vendors' mutual customers first before they will be rolled out more broadly in the future.

Murphy and Lin said the partnership was conceived after each tech vendor had numerous conversations with their customers. BigID and TrustArc conversed about the union for more than a year. With numerous joint customers and little product overlap, the companies felt it was the right decision to make. 

"This is a market-driven partnership in many ways," Murphy said. "We have a lot of mutual customers in the enterprise who are utilizing both solutions, and we realize to better served them and the market as a whole, we needed to do something together."

While BigID and TrustArc have worked together in the past, Lin said the tech vendors are excited to have agreed to an official partnership. Lin and Murphy have been in the tech space for some time, and both know how challenging it can be to perform successful product integration.

Murphy pointed to a privacy tech industry that has companies ranging from established players to "brand-new angel investment vendors." He believes tech vendors should do a careful examination before launching into a similar venture.

"When it comes to integration, I think we did a very careful job integrating these two products together," Murphy said. "BigID has an open API base for architecture that is very easy to integrate with, but there has to be a selectiveness to who you partner with and look at whether the solutions and technology are complementary enough to integrate."

Lin saw first-hand how the issue can present itself during his 20 years in the security industry. He described poor product integration as one of the security industry's biggest pain points and one the privacy industry should work to avoid.

"The way we think about integration is pretty simple both within our platform and with our partners," Lin said. "We strive to deliver a consistent and coherent experience to our customers and make life simpler and not more complicated for them. If they have to go into five different tools to solve a problem, that’s making your life harder, not simpler."

Lin said this announcement is "phase one" of the collaboration between BigID and TrustArc. He expects the evolution and continued developments of the union to be dictated by the direction of the market and customer feedback. Murphy also anticipates the future of the integration to be influenced by their clients' response.

"We take a lot of input from our customers, and we really want to ensure they are successful with their products," Murphy said. "Both companies are going to continue to innovate on their products, and we’ll see new opportunities to integrate additional functionality as our road maps continue to progress through 2020 and into 2021."

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash