As a $122B company, AT&T spends more on data security and protection than most organizations. Without any direct knowledge of their specific security measures, except that they follow ISO/IEC 27001 standards, it is safe to assume they have firewalls, access controls, data encryption and implement other industry-standard security measures.  There is even a good chance your organization utilizes the same types of security measures as AT&T. Given AT&T’s recent breach notification, it clearly was not adequate for them. How comfortable are you that checking all the boxes on your data security checklist will keep your data safe? This is a very real concern. If a giant such as AT&T can have this massive data loss, how safe is anyone?

One organization whose data is safer than AT&T’s and safer than yours is The Los Angeles Trust for Children’s Health (The L.A. Trust).  You probably never heard of them because they have never been in the news for a data breach. Among the amazing work they do, they collect individual FERPA-protected (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) student data from the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and HIPAA-protected (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) data from over a dozen healthcare providers. Then, they combine that data together at the individual level to discover potential relationships between healthcare services and academic performance. If their data was exposed, we would have all heard about it.

With over 600,000 students every year, LAUSD is the second largest school district in the country. Make no mistake, they take their data stewardship responsibility seriously. LAUSD implements all the industry-standard data protection measures, just like AT&T does and just like your organization likely does. However, while LAUSD has been in the news twice in the last two years due to high-profile data breaches, The L.A. Trust, whose data protection budget is a fraction of LAUSD’s and would not even register as a rounding error for AT&T, has not. Instead, The L.A. Trust is as immune to PII data breach exposures as possible.

The L.A. Trust is more secure than LAUSD, AT&T and very likely you because their data is protected by Anonomatic. Specifically, The L.A. Trust utilizes Poly-Anonymization® to protect their sensitive data. Unlike legacy de-identification techniques, Poly-Anonymization is unique and provides capabilities even the future and much touted, homomorphic encryption will not be able to do. For example, with Poly-Anonymization:

• No Personal Identifying Information (PII), in any form included being encrypted, is present in their database
• Poly-Anonymized data is as FULLY FUNCTIONAL as data with PII. There is nothing you can do with fully identified data that you cannot do with Poly-Anonymized data.
• Poly-Anonymization is a ‘Data Utilization’ solution that allows you to get full value from data which is completely de-identified. This is not something that is remotely possible with any other solution.
• Data, Poly-Anonymized by different sources, can be shared then combined at the individual level without any party exchanging any PII.
• Any type of system (transactional, analytics, data science, AI) or data warehouse, becomes  completely PII free while simultaneously being 100% fully functional.
• Perform fuzzy searching without requiring entire columns to be decrypted.
• Achieve post-quantum security, today, on standard hardware.

It is counterintuitive to think that data without identifying values is just as individually usable as fully identified data, but once the leap is made, then this ground-breaking technology’s immense value becomes apparent. Some of the most prevalent use cases which Poly-Anonymization makes more secure, faster to market and far less expensive include:

• AI
• Cloud Migration
• Data Sharing
• Data Mesh
• Data Sovereignty
• Non-production Use of Production Data
• PII-Free Data Cleanrooms for any type of Data Science
• PII-Free Enterprise Data Warehouses
• PII-Free and Fully Functional Transactional Systems (PII-as-a-Service®)

When  Poly-Anonymization is compared to encryption, encryption’s weaknesses become as clear as the emperor’s new clothes. If your environment is breached, and encrypted data is exposed, the attackers have one goal and that is to break, or steal, the encryption key. Considering the inevitable arrival of quantum computers, and that potentially up to 80% of all breaches include insider involvement, either unintentional or not, then that one layer of security is very weak.  Compared to this, the Anonomatic security model includes seven layers of security, including multiple patented and patent-pending technologies.

There is far more to Anonomatic capabilities and our PII-as-a-Service than can ever fit into any single blog. So, if you want to learn more about how you can ensure your data can be more secure than a $122B per year company, reach out to us: sales@anonomatic.com

Learn more about The L.A. Trust and their ground-breaking Data xChange, secured by Anonomatic.