TerraTrue Launches Real-Time Data Map Solution Powered by Structured Data

TerraTrue, an innovator in privacy, today announced the availability of automated data mapping within its privacy platform. Based on structured data, TerraTrue’s data map eliminates the need to rely on manual and unreliable methods like internal or third-party team surveys. It also replaces solutions that pose a security risk by requiring access to scan a company’s entire technology infrastructure to build a data map. TerraTrue’s real-time data map uses a proactive approach to ensure a data map is complete, accurate, updated automatically, centralized, and auditable within the platform.

Traditional approaches to data mapping
Building a data map has traditionally been a cumbersome, repetitive, and time-consuming process. Companies historically go down one of two paths that usually led to incomplete, inaccurate, or outdated data. The manual path means companies conduct ad hoc internal surveys with each team member to attempt a data map that illustrates how data flows in the organization. While this process is not only time-consuming, the end result is often incomplete, unstructured (in the form of essays, slack messages, etc), and/or inaccurate. Someone still needs to manually aggregate the data to comprehend it in a table or flow chart.

Some businesses soon realized the resource constraint and started to rely on third parties. This approach empowers outside vendors to scan the entire infrastructure of a company to extract the data tracked within their organization to produce a data map. While this sounds good in theory, in reality, the process and output are inconsistent, unreliable, and open up further security concerns on the basis of sharing this data with a third party. Add to that, this so-called automated process can end up being just as time-consuming and costly for the company as the manual path.

In both scenarios, data mapping is a siloed independent process for one-time use. The data map will be updated once, and then be immediately outdated as more data types, data uses, and third parties are updated in the organization. Both strategies are retroactive and pose an issue that puts privacy teams on their heels to constantly play catch up. Privacy managers are always at a disadvantage because their data map is only a reflection of what was done in the past.

“We’ve had customers come to us after working with so-called automated data mapping solutions and the output that’s given back to them is a spreadsheet with 6 rows and 20 columns,’’ said Chris Handman, co-founder and COO of TerraTrue and former Snap General Counsel. “It feels incomplete and can also waste a year plus of their time. Our approach eliminates redundant work. You no longer need to hit your team with the same questions over and over just to produce a one-time use document. Our data map preserves information from past reviews so the end result is both evergreen and real-time.”

TerraTrue shifts the data map process from reactive to proactive
TerraTrue’s Shift Left approach positions privacy teams earlier in the product lifecycle. Shifting privacy left flips privacy from reactive to proactive, ensuring that teams ship products with all the right privacy considerations baked in — and all without bottlenecking the business. The data map workflow is built into the product development process that every team member follows before anyone even writes a line of code. Over time, as more information is entered into its platform, TerraTrue learns how an organization handles data types for specific data uses and provides suggestions on the Data Spec so it becomes faster to fill out every time. Business users don’t have to waste time answering the same survey questions every month, quarter, or year. TerraTrue’s solution delivers an updated data map as a natural consequence of the work that is already done to suss out risk proactively.

Key benefits of TerraTrue’s approach to building a data map:

Eliminate the redundant work of manual team surveys
The TerraTrue privacy program does not rely on a historical data map to build an updated one. TerraTrue embeds privacy-by-design into the entire product development process, using structured data that allows teams to import past work, create consistent taxonomies, and provide real-time recommendations. The process of building a data map is now done simply by driving the adoption of a privacy program instead of manual surveys and updates.

Spot potential risks without relying on cloud scanning or manual reviews
TerraTrue’s out-of-the-box workflow comes with a comprehensive Data Spec that warns users about risky data types, provides recommendations, and ensures the Data Spec is completed before kicking off a privacy review. Powered by structured data, this workflow eliminates the need to review/answer the same things over and over, provides consistent feedback to teams, and aggregates all completed reviews into a data map.

Consistently produce an accurate real-time data map
By adopting TerraTrue’s privacy program and a structured data approach, you start to embed privacy earlier in the product development process. Using the product and workflow means less time is spent on actually managing and updating a data map, which becomes streamlined and automatically aggregated as privacy reviews are completed.

Learn more about how to build an accurate data map
Download the Six Steps to Maintaining an Accurate Data Map guide – here

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About TerraTrue
TerraTrue empowers teams to build privacy and security into everything they do through a collaborative, intuitive, and scalable platform. Purpose-built to work with modern product development, TerraTrue seamlessly captures structured data about how teams plan to collect, use, store, and share data. The platform then maps that digital blueprint to the world’s privacy laws to automate guidance, risk-flagging, and downstream data maps and reports. Sitting as a hub between product teams and review teams, TerraTrue also smartly routes rule-based workflows throughout an organization, automatically detects and reports infrastructure changes in cloud environments, and drives vendor management — all from the same single source of truth. Using TerraTrue, companies run a scalable, fast privacy-by-design program that eliminates spreadsheets, manual ad-hoc processes, and compliance bottlenecks. TerraTrue was founded in 2018 by former Snap execs and is backed by, among others, 3L Capital, Anthos Capital, and Chris Sacca. Modern brands like Lyft, Robinhood, Roku, and Foursquare are shifting left to get privacy right with TerraTrue.

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Contact Information

Brian Ferrario

Head of Global Marketing

TerraTrue

brian@terratrue.com