Yours is likely one of them, because you’re doing the research. You’ve identified that:
- Your company’s data lives in silos, and you could benefit from a holistic analysis of that data and/o
- You have strategic partners (or potential partners) that have data that would be valuable to your company or partners that could benefit from your data … if only you could both share that data without risk
Now you’re searching for a solution to help achieve effective data collaboration with your partners or across department silos while addressing any concerns.
You may have already found many software companies that boast that their data collaboration solution can help. But in today’s environment, if it isn’t a modern and flexible data clean room, it likely doesn’t check all the boxes.
Why? Two primary reasons:
First, regulatory changes. In the aim to improve consumer privacy, regulatory changes have made it more difficult to reach target audiences and measure performance.
Second, businesses have been historically reluctant to share proprietary data about their consumers for a number of reasons, even if there is some benefit to do so.
Data clean rooms solve both of these issues and more, while other methods may not.
The challenge is that clean rooms come in many shapes, and oftentimes — but not always! — you have to be an experienced data scientist to use them.
To help you understand the differences among your many options, and discover the right combination of services and software for your company, we’ve developed eight key considerations — or rather, questions to ask — when evaluating data clean rooms.
1. Does the data clean room enable access to distributed data sets with no data movement?
Moving data is a huge security risk. It needs to be protected where it lives, when in transit, and wherever it lands. Co-mingling data in a single platform is an antiquated approach to collaboration and smart companies are not moving their data.
The ideal data clean room enables you and your partners to leverage data wherever it lives; not only is this a security must for you, it can help assure potential collaboration partners to pursue opportunities they previously may have never considered.
2. Does the data clean room integrate with multiple cloud environments?
Data is more distributed than ever and often your own data (such as CRM or media) and partner’s data live in various clouds or other environments. In order to maximize the full potential of your own data and the partners’ you would like to collaborate with, you need a solution that is interoperable.
The best data clean room will enable you to work across any cloud, platform, or even other clean rooms.
3. Does the solution address all of your current and future security needs?
As privacy regulations continue to evolve, you need a flexible privacy and governance framework that can seamlessly adapt across geographies.
Your data clean room provider should be able to achieve this; if not, you’re going to hit roadblocks that prohibit you from maximizing the data collaboration opportunities available.
4. Does the data clean room make it easy to collaborate with outside partners without exposing proprietary data?
Your data is your most critical asset, which is why many companies have been hesitant to share it in the past. Privacy-preserving techniques such as random noise injection and redaction thresholds should be embedded in the technology, empowering the data owner to select the level they wish to apply to each partner and use case.
5. Does the data clean room support a flexible identity approach?
One of the primary uses of data clean room software is to join distributed data. In the vast majority of data collaboration scenarios, achieving a critical mass of identity resolution will be a requirement, and match rates will dictate the potential scale of the opportunity.
In order to maximize the value of collaboration opportunities available, you need a solution that can work across any identity space.
6. Does the solution help solve for measurement in a cookieless era?
The demise of third party cookies doesn’t mean the end for measurement. It simply means the way we measure needs to evolve, and clean rooms will play a very important role in a reimagined measurement strategy.
Data clean rooms offer data owners complete privacy and control. This means that businesses that utilize them will be comfortable sharing rich signals from their data assets with their key partners, in order to provide a more complete view of the customer journey.
Clean rooms have unlocked opportunities for companies to gain access to data like NEVER before. And sophisticated companies that would have never even considered sharing data now have the ability to do so.
7. Does the data clean room offer tools that not only a data scientist can use, but also the non-data scientist business person?
A data clean room should be a usable data collaboration solution, designed to support both the data scientist AND the marketer or business manager. It should help them solve business challenges big and small while gaining fast insights that they can take action on now, not in days or weeks when it might be too late.
Any business user should be able to access a robust library of business questions and visualizations, while data scientists are also able to accomplish more complex and customized queries. When more people are able to utilize the data clean room software, you will be able to easily scale your efforts across the organization.
8. Does the solution provide end-to-end applications that drive the business outcomes you desire?
The fact you are reading this is a clear indication your company could benefit from data clean room software to help you safely and securely share data with multiple external partners as well as different departments within your organization.
To fully leverage your data and a partner’s data in a secure environment, you need a solution that offers end-to-end applications and the flexibility to support a myriad of use cases to include insights, measurement, experimentation, machine learning, activation, and more. If the clean room is too rigid, you will be limited with the use cases you can achieve and results you will see.
The Bottom Line: Find the Data Clean Room Solution That Works for Your Business
Your data clean room software selection should be able to answer a resounding YES to all eight of these questions; not only will this solution likely help you outperform your peers in the next year, but it will also help you navigate and overcome regulatory challenges and encourage previously reluctant partners to participate in data collaboration opportunities with you.
Data clean rooms enable companies to finally collaborate in broad daylight, with fine grain control over access and usage, and in a privacy preserving manner. This new data collaboration technology is unlocking more interesting, more impactful, and more compliant partnership opportunities.
If you’d like to learn more about how data clean rooms enable secure data collaboration, and how Habu’s solution can help your business, let’s set up a call.
