Time flies when you’re having fun! For two years, our incredible team has been working to deliver an upgrade to the InfoSum Platform that extends our already considerable technical competitive advantage - introducing Platform Sigma.
A core part of our philosophy for expanding the platform was our assertion that customers should not need to adopt new data warehouse solutions to enable collaboration and analytics. Platform Sigma strengthens and expands our lightweight ‘read-only’ approach enabling our data clean room infrastructure to sit on top of the data you already own, eliminating the need for any changes to existing data infrastructure which can create significant disruption to organizations.
Platform Sigma also expands on the idea of ‘end-to-end’ clean data. What we see in the market today is ‘clean room’ terminology being applied to very basic ‘hashing’ or other point solution cryptographic technologies.These are only ‘clean’ for a very small part of the data journey, making them almost pointless (and more of a checkbox exercise). Other “clean room” solutions require data to be copied, co-mingled, and offer little to no privacy protections while the data is at rest, in motion, or in use. InfoSum + Platform Sigma is unique. Not only do we support true secure multi-party collaboration (e.g. three or more datasets) but that all operations e.g. normalization, identity matching, analytics, measurement, activation are all under clean room conditions.
Platform Sigma also fundamentally expands on ‘non-movement of data’, a term we invented and is now endlessly copied -we are flattered. InfoSum is the only technology that offers genuine, end-to-end collaboration with zero movement of data. Through our patented technology all of our audience processing is done through a multi-party computation technique called ‘private set intersection’. While others are using PSI, InfoSum has been able to scale this to work across billions of rows of data in seconds.
Lastly Platform Sigma expands our client’s ability to include transactional and historical data across user profiles down to the row and log level in order to execute more advanced use cases such as measurement. This is an enhancement from our legacy platform which correlates each row to one user profile. This change gives organizations the opportunity to work on any data, regardless of size, format or location with next level data processing capabilities, unlocking data transformation at unparalleled scale all while keeping the data ‘clean’.
Any Data, Any Size, Any Format, Anywhere….
The Platform Sigma release contains both enhancements to our existing capabilities, and brand new capabilities. Let's dive into each in a bit more detail.
Cloud Vault
Cloud Vaults were created to answer a challenge - how can we take another large step in our goal around protecting customer data and expanding ‘non-movement’ of data across the full lifecycle of first-party data. Cloud Vault follows industry trends towards allowing computation to happen directly on top of Cloud Storage which has become so pervasive. This means both for scale and safety not having to move a complete copy of the data to another location or expose an entire customer database for collaboration which puts an organization, their partners, and the customer at increased security and legal risk.
This now means InfoSum’s data clean room infrastructure that can sit directly on top of an organization’s data where it already exists and only live stream of the data is produced for on-demand processing using ephemeral compute. This delivers unlimited scalability for the very largest datasets - we’ve tested multi-terabyte datasets
Transformations
Data comes in all shapes and sizes, it also tends to be messy living in multiple environments, regions, and formats. In combination with Cloud Vault we have built a whole new transformation layer that can on demand and at scale reshape any dataset from within the Cloud Vault. This tight integration alongside our current data cleansing and normalization processing results in a simple end-to-end process eliminating the need to rely on additional third party tools or external systems; keeping first-party data secure and in complete control of the datal.
The transformation engine works with our new ephemeral computing cloud so that work can be processed on demand and at scale.
Interoperability
As part of platform Sigma we have expanded the way in which our technology can be adopted, including kicking off a number of open source projects in the realm of PETs (Privacy Enhancing Technologies).
But what does Interoperability really mean? Is it Interoperable Identity, Interoperable Audiences, Interoperable Privacy Controls? For us Interoperability fundamentally means accessibility and integration.
Platform Sigma encompasses four key areas of Interoperability, we will give a brief outline below but will be following up in the coming weeks and months with more details of each of these.
1) Full SQL Compatibility - Previously, InfoSum was only to utilize our hyper-secure IQL language that supports advanced differential privacy. But today we’re excited to confirm we will be adding native SQL support tied to a whole new suite of permissioning and privacy controls that keeps all data secure and privacy-safe.
2) Safe Audience Transfer (SAT) - This is our new name for how audiences are compared and matched across datasets. We already use extensively within the InfoSum Platform and we are both open sourcing the technology for others to use, while also making it really simple to import / export audiences in the SAT format.
3) App Exchange - InfoSum is data clean room infrastructure and we know many want to integrate our data collaboration capabilities directly into their existing solutions. AppExchange along with new SDK’s will allow third parties to build Web Applications that integrate directly with our platform. Alternatively if a customer has their own application, they can embed our technology into them, taking advantage of our login / credentials and data permissions. Importantly all of our platform capabilities can be exposed within those applications. We hope this will lead to a whole new world of new workflows, visualizations and specific use cases being developed.
4) Open API - All of Platform Sigma was built from the ground up to be controllable through our API allowing others to integrate, coordinate and automate every aspect of our platform.
In Summary
InfoSum’s name was derived from ‘the sum is greater than the parts’ and Platform Sigma represents a large expansion of capabilities and features, but at same time the ‘Sum’ of those parts are all part of one platform. This means we will be delivering on our goal of building one network that will massively simplify the need for companies to collaborate.
I look forward to hearing people's feedback on what we have built.
