Presented by Capital One Software
Companies can’t maximize the value of their data without strong data security. Data breaches are becoming more common each year, and every company is looking to deploy AI—making it even more critical to properly safeguard data. Without strong data security, companies risk inadvertently exposing sensitive data to AI models, losing sensitive data in a breach, and other fallout. While data security has always been a top priority, the age we live in—the age of AI—requires companies to embrace advanced data protection techniques.
There’s an entire ecosystem of security methods and controls that need to be in place for data to be well protected. Among the data protection techniques available, tokenization is a powerful method for protecting sensitive information. Tokenization replaces real data with format-preserving tokens, helping to protect sensitive elements of the data without limiting its utility.
Recognizing the benefits of tokenization, Capital One has been on its own multi-year tokenization journey. We built a tokenization engine to operate at the speed and scale that our business requires and today we have billions of tokenized records across hundreds of applications. As a bank operating at a large scale, we view tokenization as a high-leverage approach to further securing our sensitive data.
Data security starts with data management
To protect data effectively, you first need to manage it effectively. That starts with knowing exactly what data you have, where it lives, who it belongs to, and how it’s used. That’s why a comprehensive data inventory is an essential first step on the journey to building a secure data ecosystem. Data leaders should start by cataloging and classifying their information assets: identify the “crown jewels” (the most sensitive or valuable data) and understand who uses them and how.
Data security and protection teams can use this knowledge to tailor defenses to each dataset’s sensitivity and use case. For example, some data might only need strict access controls and monitoring, whereas highly sensitive fields demand stronger safeguards such as tokenization. This groundwork is essential to ensuring that data is well protected, yet easy for the right people to find and use it.
How tokenization enhances data security
Tokenization maintains the data structure and certain statistical properties while preserving utility, helping to minimize the risk of exposing sensitive data. The technology swaps a sensitive data element—say a credit card number or social security number—for a random token of the same format. This can limit the blast radius of a potential cyber attack by minimizing the value of tokenized sensitive data to bad actors. Authorized users can still move the tokenized data throughout their environment—and even manage third-party data sharing—to deliver business value.
Tokens are meaningless outside of their specific context and cannot be reverse-engineered without access to the original mapping. This means that tokenization can also help to ensure that sensitive data is not exposed to an AI model. This provides a critical safeguard against data leakage, especially as AI models increasingly rely on large, complex datasets.
There’s a common fear that tighter security will slow down innovation. In reality, modern data protection methods like tokenization, coupled with smart workflow automation, are designed to minimize friction. At Capital One, we’ve found that tokenizing select data actually empowers developers to collaborate more freely since sensitive details are shielded. When done right, data security isn’t a tax on innovation, it’s a catalyst that can make data even more valuable when there’s trust that strong safeguards are in place.
Data security as a lever for innovation
There is no singular solution for well-protected data, but tokenization can be a valuable method for companies looking to secure sensitive data at scale. It works best alongside other measures including fine-grained access controls, well-applied encryption, and continuous monitoring. But as part of a layered defense, it’s a powerful linchpin that remains effective even as new threats emerge.
Ultimately, enabling data innovation without compromising on security is key to unlocking business value. Inspired by our own journey, we’re helping companies leverage the power of tokenization with Capital One Databolt, a vaultless tokenization solution that enables businesses to secure sensitive data at scale. With Databolt, companies can build applications and AI models knowing that their sensitive data is tokenized and better protected from potential exposure.
Learn more about Databolt here.
Leon Bian is VP, head of Databolt product at Capital One Software.
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