#225: The Future of Data Collaboration, with the President of Fluree, Eliud Polanco

This week on the Data Futurology podcast, we have a special guest, Eliud Polanco, to talk about an innovative approach to data management and access. This approach promises to make models and the management of data more reliable and secure. 

Polanco, who is the president of Fluree, looks to a blockchain-driven future for data, where data blocks sit on the ledger, and the ability to access and modify them is based on a zero trust approach. 

This unlocks innovation, Polanco says on the podcast, allowing organisations and individuals to take greater control over data, and do so in a more efficient manner. He points to GDPR regulations as a good example of where this approach can help. Currently, GDPR regulations require a lot of paperwork, but it’s inefficient and often ignored by both consumers and organisations. However, through a blockchain-based, decentralised approach to data management, a person’s right to control their data can be enhanced, but in such a way that the organisation can also manage the data more efficiently and effectively.

Polanco also provides an excellent potential use case in the financial services space. Financial services have strict regulatory requirements to monitor for money laundering and other illegal activities. However, that can be difficult to do based on data privacy and other regulations. In the example Polanco gives, it is difficult for a US financial services organisation to monitor transactions with Singapore, because US organisations can’t easily get access to Singaporean financial data. 

However, this decentralised approach opens up the opportunity to have automation query data and return answers without the agent ever needing to see or touch the data. Suddenly it becomes possible to note a transaction without seeing the data of the transaction itself.

Enjoy this in-depth and nuanced discussion about one of the more exciting innovations on the data horizon. 

Connect with Eliud Polanco: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eliud-polanco-977529131/

Contact Fluree: https://flur.ee/contact/

Read Fluree's Whitepaper on Data-Centric Architecture: https://flur.ee/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Data-Centric-Technology-Architecture.pdf

Thank you to our podcast sponsor, Talent Insights Group!

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“If I’m not going to read it and you’re not going to enforce it, what are we doing?’ So much of GDPR and similar policies is just a lot of paperwork..”

— Eliud Polanco, President of Fluree

WHAT WE DISCUSSED

What we discussed:

1:17 Polanco’s background, and what led to the birth of Fluree.

2:28 What are some of the main pain points that Eliud has seen in the market?

5:45 How can organisations start to address the challenge of a lack of trust in data?

10:10 There’s more data work than the number of people that are available. What’s the best way to approach this challenge?

15:04 How can data definitions work when applying a centralised approach to data management?

19:13 How do access controls work with your vision for self-describing data?

22:15 How is the zero-trust approach similar or different to some of the data access models that are already being used?

26:36 Are there any examples of this zero-trust approach to data that have been successful so far?

31:31: Introducing the idea of Secure Multi-Party Computation – what is it and what does it mean for data management?

34:51: How can a decentralised approach to data assist with the data lifecycle?

40:41: The power of the semantic layer over data, and using semantic language to define access and use of data.

42:48 How can people get started with decentralised data?

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

• “Let's say that we've got ten weeks to build a model and get it into production. We then spend around eight and a half weeks just trying to get around the data. Then we spend the last week and a half actually building and testing the model. So, every project was a heart attack. We'd sit there and say, ‘there has got to be a better way to do this.’”

• “The big challenge that we've got is that we've got so many copies of data. When people want to build reports, they take their sources of data, and they might enrichen it a little. So what happens is that you have so many different versions of slightly off data, and nobody knows what to trust anymore.”

• “Let's say that you want to move the function-centric or application-centric approach to a more data-centric view. Part of this is going to be the cultural view. Part of that culture is saying that no business function, nor individual business function owns the data. The enterprise owns the data, and you could be the steward of the data, but you don't own it.”

• “A major trend that we're seeing is zero trust architectures for data. What that means is that instead of thinking about data as being written into a database, you think about data as being written into a protocol. And that anybody that subscribes to the protocol can instantaneously read any data, as long as they're allowed to do it by policy.”

• “Self-describing data means that you cannot separate the definition of data outside of the data itself. Therefore, you put the data on the universal data store, and everyone should be able to query it, find it and access it. As long as they’re allowed to by policy.”

• “We can’t have the data over there and the access logic here – we need to embed the access logic directly into the data itself.”

• “We currently live in a world where people are given 900-page privacy policies, and in most cases they’d simply say ‘yes, fine, I agree.’ And then the company would take it, and they wouldn't even meet the terms of the policy themselves. So, you have to ask the question ‘if I’m not going to read it and you’re not going to enforce it, what are we doing?’ So much of GDPR and similar policies is just a lot of paperwork.”

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