BeyondCore combines compliance and the cloud

July 5, 2011 Off By David
Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

With its new SplitSecure technology, Structure 2011 LaunchPad finalist BeyondCore is trying to prove that companies processing sensitive data don’t have to be afraid of cloud computing. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company has actually been around since 2003, but SplitSecure represents its first foray into the cloud.

At Structure 2011, BeyondCore Founder and CEO Arijit Sengupta explained how SplitSecure works. Essentially, the Software-as-a-Service offering separates transactions into sensitive and non-sensitive data, keeping sensitive data in-house while processing non-sensitive data in the cloud. When all the data has been processed, SplitSecure reassembles the pieces into a unified result.

In a health-care-related transaction, for example, SplitSecure would identify information protected by HIPAA regulations and ensure it isn’t send to the cloud for processing. It gets more fine-grained, though, Sengupta said, even identifying which pieces of information might need to have access to one another (e.g., a patient’s name and pharmaceutical history) and whether something might be better suited for processing on a particular infrastructure.

Taking it a step further, he added that SplitSecure could even add security to non-sensitive information such as a person’s name by storing and processing the first and last name on different clouds. Separating information to enable cloud-based processing has been around for a while — as anyone trying to process credit card transaction while complying with the PCI standard can attest to — but having that process automated via a SaaS product is fairly novel.

The technology appears appealing to service providers that want to give customers as much flexibility as possible when it comes to choosing the right infrastructure for the job. According to Sengupta, SplitSecure is already in use with six of the 10 multiple top outsourcing providers, including Accenture, and BeyondCore is in talks with leading Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers, too.