Dataguise, Obsidian partner on PoPI compliance

Obsidian Systems has partnered with Dataguise to provide comprehensive data governance. Focused on enabling the data-driven enterprise, Obsidian Systems’ relationship with Dataguise is focused on strengthening data security and compliance for medium to large enterprises throughout Africa.
Obsidian Systems is a South Africa-based IT solution provider that brings vendor certified training and products along with local consulting and support to its customers. The company was started in 1995 to work with businesses and organisations looking to integrate and leverage Linux infrastructure and is now a top supplier of Open Source software solutions.
Obsidian Systems has aligned with providers such as Hortonworks in the architecture of data analytics projects for organisations and the announcement today with Dataguise furthers their leadership in addressing upcoming regional compliance mandates, including South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information (PoPI) Act.
The PoPI Act went into effect in 2014 and mandates that organizations in South Africa operate responsibly when it comes to collecting, processing, storing, and sharing third-party information. The Act holds organizations accountable for the abuse or compromise of personal information in any way. It gives consumers certain rights of protection and the ability to exercise control over the integrity and accuracy of one’s data, how the information is shared, who accesses the data, how it can be used, as well as the ability to destroy it when requested.
Dataguise DgSecure helps organizations to comply with the Act by providing complete visibility of customer data regardless of physical or virtual location within an IT environment. These environments may include Hadoop or other big data repositories, but can also include distributed database environments or unstructured file servers. After the identification of such data, the administrator has the ability to assign protection in the form of either masking, encryption, or tokenization with the ability to monitor/audit the data throughout its possession.
“Obsidian Systems is a respected IT solution provider that many organizations trust to build data infrastructure they can rely on. This includes partnering with world-class technology vendors with a proven track record in serving the Global 2000,” says Muggie van Staden, MD of Obsidian Systems. “With regulatory mandates such as PoPI a concern for many of the organizations we support, the experience, technology, and guidance from Dataguise has significant advantages in ensuring total data governance. We have been impressed with the company and its software from the start.”
DgSecure is a comprehensive data security and compliance solution for all data source types, allowing users to quickly understand what, where, and how sensitive data is being detected, protected, and accessed across the enterprise. The advanced features in version 6.0 provide all-in-one sensitive data governance, privacy compliance, and risk mitigation for total ownership of sensitive data in all its forms. The software supports the widest range of IT and data management frameworks and enhances the operational experience for data stewards and CISOs managing these systems.
“Privacy data continues to expand in terms of categorization and complexity. Therefore, it has become increasingly difficult to detect, protect, monitor and audit, both on-premises and in the cloud,” said Ron Miles, Vice President, International Sales. “Dataguise provides a comprehensive offering that accomplishes this with ease for complete confidence in the secure utilization of third-party information. We are proud to align with Obsidian Systems in providing one of the industry’s most thorough data governance platforms on the market.”