Using Innovation to Unlock the Power of Data Markets and Exchanges

Data exchanges and markets aren’t exactly new. I directed an early one, for global economic and business intelligence series, back at Standard & Poor’s in the late 90’s. While there are now many such markets, both internal and public-facing, the dual problems of data protection and privacy still stifle innovation, and keep market sponsors and participants small and restricted to less-valuable data. Let’s talk a bit about how markets, and their participants and users, can revive and exploit fully the opportunities that data markets and exchanges present.

What’s a data market? Pretty simple: a virtual construct where analytics users can find, access, and use data that is made available by companies with data, for a price and under agreed-upon terms. Just like a shopping mall or Amazon. The problem is, data is not just like any “real” product. Economically, data can be sold and used on an unlimited basis with no loss (a property known as “non-rivalry”), but if any user shares the data publicly it can lose all its value. Think of your company’s customer list or price list, which could be valuable for a co-marketing plan … if a prior partner lost the list and it appeared online, “the horse is out of the barn”. Speaking of customer lists, there is also the problem of privacy, because “losing” the list could kill the company after the regulators and courts are done with it.

Storing the safely before use is a “solved” problem technically, as is how to move it securely. But the chink in the armor, the Achilles heel, the squeaky wheel … is that once the data is shared, how do you know it isn’t being leaked, misused, used for inappropriate purposes, or just leaked to the marketplace?

This is the “data in use” problem, and is only newly solved for data markets. The answer is a new kind of data cleanroom a “smart” one that uses digital contracts to govern data access, and secure enclaves – also known as “confidential compute” technology – to carry out all computations and processing in absolute secrecy. With this approach, data in the market is not being “shared” with the processor, and only with the algorithm or analytic. The processor never “has” the data”, but she does get all the insights from the data, with visualizations from a complex model or predictions from a machine learning construct.

With this approach, a “cleanroom” using digital-contract governed secure enclaves, the market can be “open for business”, and data providers and data processors alike can transact safely, efficiently, and productively whether for better operational performance or for the most ambitious monetization program.

By the way, that Standard & Poor’s data market: we ended up shutting down because the data owners were unable to be satisfied that their data couldn’t just be downloaded and just distributed freely through its client organizations. I wish we had then had such a “smart data cleanroom” like the one we’ve innovated at Helios Data. Let me know if I can tell you about how our Secure Data Sharing platform can solve your enterprise or market facing data exchange challenges.