Data privacy trends to keep an eye on in 2021

There is a lot of exciting stuff happening in the data privacy space right now. Here are some trends that I’ve been thinking about lately:

1. A new data privacy stack is forming. Companies need 3–5 different solutions: data anonymization, data access controls, monitoring for PII, managing data deletion requests, etc
2. The data warehouse is becoming a central point for GRC. Companies are re-doing privacy strategies as they adopt Snowflake and shift to the cloud.
3. Legacy data privacy companies are consulting businesses for compliance advice, and they’re highly manual. They lack automation & zero config and will be slowly disrupted.
4. Privacy engineering is on the rise outside of Google, Apple, and AWS. This will become a role at many tech companies, and there will be software that sells into this role.
5. Privacy could shift left to the developer in the same way that security has. It’s also shifting to the data engineer. Privacy could go bottoms-up.
6. F*ck YAML. Not sure how this fits in here (it doesn’t), but it was fun to write.
7. Data privacy isn’t just about GDPR & CCPA. It’s about brand and consumer trust. It’s about making data breaches less painful for CISOs.
8. Everyone is talking about “private by design” apps, but there doesn’t seem to be consensus on the exact architecture. I’m still intrigued by the idea.
9. There still seems to be opportunity to discover, classify, and protect unstructured data in S3 buckets, though some people are working towards this today.

I’m still learning about this market, and I’m keen to hear other points of view. Please reach out! I’m @reneeshah123 on Twitter.