The proliferation of cloud apps has created high-network user groups. The ease of integrating with Rest APIs has the added benefit of sharing data and files between Slack, Google Sheets and other SaaS products. However, sensitive data in multiple places within open chat channels creates a compliance headache of managing data-leak and regulatory risk.
Collaboration tools have made it super easy to set up virtual teams on Slack, HubSpot, Trello, Asana, Jira, Notion etc. This has created duplicate records (organization’s data) in multiple applications.
The following is an attempt to explain the data privacy challenges brought on by distributed data environments from a grounds up tech-stack overview.
1) Microservices
Adoption of micro-services based cloud architectures. All data sources and destinations are built on dockers, GCP kubernetes, AWS Lambda etc.
2) Databases
Multiple data stores and warehouses housing transactions, customer data or other data feeds. These domains are usually demarcated with different labels.
3) Applications
Hubspot, Slack, Airtable, Windows, Gmail, Trello, Asana have created super easy interfaces to move information between these. PII data in multiple sources of truth makes it impossible to control who in an organization can see what. In larger enterprises in regulated industries this is a huge risk.
