Startup Uses AI and Deep Learning To Secure Unstructured Data
There's gold in the mountain of unstructured data piling up daily in the enterprise, but there's risk in that pile, too. Sensitive documents, improperly secured and inappropriately shared, represent a growing source of security and compliance concerns in enterprises. And it's all but impossible to identify and protect unstructured business data manually.
"Unstructured data is copious and dispersed, and it includes an alarming amount of business-critical information," said Karthik Krishnan, CEO and co-founder of Concentric. "We're talking about things like contracts, financial documents, payroll, M&A plans, product roadmaps, and source code -- complex data that's incredibly difficult to secure. That's why it's targeted by cybercriminals. This is the data challenge of our digital generation, and it's one that we're laser-focused on solving."
Krishnan's company emerged today from stealth mode with its solution to this problem. The Concentric Semantic Intelligence platform is being billed as the first solution of its kind to utilize AI and deep learning to uncover the business criticality and risk in documents dispersed across an enterprise.
The platform leverages deep learning capabilities to identify and autonomously quantify risk by developing an accurate and detailed semantic understanding of all the data in an organization, Krishnan told Pure AI. When at-risk files are found, the platform's native remediation capabilities proactively and automatically remediate the document's risk factors to protect them.
"When you're talking about things like contracts, financial documents, payroll, M&A plans, product roadmaps, and source code, you're talking about extremely complex, unstructured data," Krishnan said. "Traditional ways of using words to derive meaning from that data no longer work, because words alone lack the necessary context. For example: search the unstructured data you have stored on-premises or in the cloud with the word 'architecture' to get every document that mentions your next-generation software architecture, and you're also going to get a whole bunch of stuff about buildings."
The Concentric Semantic Intelligence platform uncovers, categorizes, and classifies the documents. It allows IT and security teams to monitor data security with up-to-the-second information and risk visualizations that drill down into the at-risk docs to get more granular detail. And it integrates with major third-party security and data stores, so that users can leverage the security investments they already have in place
Concentric was founded by Krishnan, CTO and VP of engineering Shankar Subramaniam, and chief data scientist Madhu Shashanka. The founders have backgrounds in networking and security at Juniper Networks, PGP Corporation, Symantec, HPE, Aruba Networks Niara, and Andiamo Systems.
About the Author
John K. Waters is the editor in chief of a number of Converge360.com sites, with a focus on high-end development, AI and future tech. He's been writing about cutting-edge technologies and culture of Silicon Valley for more than two decades, and he's written more than a dozen books. He also co-scripted the documentary film Silicon Valley: A 100 Year Renaissance, which aired on PBS. He can be reached at jwaters@converge360.com.