“Privacy Concerns Are at Odds with the Desire to Advance the Access to Data, but We Need to Do Both Well to Be Successful”

The Resonance Test 77: The Data Paradox with John Reardon, Val Tsitlik, and Sam Rehman

Data: Organizations have an incessant demand for it, in order to operate and innovate—but at the same time, gathering and analyzing all this data creates legitimate privacy concerns. This is what John Reardon, VP & Senior Director of Global Risk Solutions Technology at Liberty Mutual Insurance, calls the data paradox, and he talks about it on our latest episode of The Resonance Test. Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, poses some questions to Reardon and Val Tsitlik, EPAM’s Head of Big Data Practice and VP of Technology Solutions, about how the data paradox works in their worlds.

Together this data-wise trio talks through the nuances of the data paradox. It’s fascinating in that they chat not just about, say, the relevance of anonymization but the idea of synthetic data (a generated data set that matches the semantics of an actual real data set).

Rehman says to Tsitlik that synthetic data allows for testing more closely to real-life scenarios and Tsitlik replies: “I'm almost thinking of this as creating a Sims world”—almost, but not quite, starting a conversation about the metaverse.

Listen and learn about data governance in our ever-growing regulatory environment (“It may feel counterintuitive that governance can equal acceleration, but in this space it actually is a key enabler,” says Reardon), tooling (“People always say it's not about the tool, but anybody that actually ever tried to fell a tree with a pocket knife before could tell you sometimes it is about the tool,” notes Rehman), and the always-relevant topic of budgets.

Speaking of budgets, if you’re a data or security professional, open up your calendar; you’ll need set aside 30 minutes to listen to this conversation.

Host: Glenn Gruber
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon