Polymer Launches With Solution That Automatically Redacts Sensitive Data Shared in Collaboration Tools
Collaboration security startup Polymer announced its official launch on Wednesday with a solution that automatically detects and redacts sensitive data shared by users in popular collaboration tools.
Free apps are available for Slack, GitHub and Dropbox. Enterprises can use the commercial version to also prevent sensitive data leaks on Zendesk, Zoom, Splunk, Box, Jira, and Atlassian Bitbucket.
Polymer is designed to detect and redact sensitive materials in real time, including personally identifiable information (PII), health information, financial data, ID information (e.g. driver’s license numbers, SSNs, passport numbers), network details, and cryptocurrency addresses and private keys.
When users share this type of information via one of the supported collaboration tools, Polymer automatically redacts sensitive information and ensures that the unredacted information can only be accessed by users that have been authorized in the Polymer administrative dashboard.
The solution can detect and redact sensitive information both when it’s included in a file — the company says over 100 file types are supported — and when it’s directly posted as text in a collaboration tool.
The goal of Polymer is to help organizations protect sensitive data and comply with regulations such as HIPAA, COPPA, CCPA and GDPR.
Polymer told SecurityWeek that its product is generally available for select integrations, with new platforms being added every three weeks. The company says it currently has three paying customers, with several potential clients in the fintech and healthcare industries. Its free app for Slack currently has over 100 users.
Polymer comes out of Acceleprise, a San Francisco-based pre-seed, B2B SaaS startup accelerator program. The company says it has not received any other outside funding to date.
In terms of pricing models, in addition to its free plan, the company offers an SME plan for companies with less than 500 employees ($30,000 annual platform fee plus a usage fee), and an enterprise plan for which interested organizations can request a quote.
“Almost 90% of global knowledge-work is happening virtually over collaborative tools and the rise of work from home is persisting this growth. At the same time, roughly 30% of data breaches happen due to human actions, and there were no guardrails put in place to secure sensitive data,” Polymer’s founder and CEO, Yasir Ali, told SecurityWeek. “Looking at this problem from a top view at major financial institutions led to Polymer. This is not a matter of ‘if’ there will be leaks but ‘how big and consistent’ those leaks will be going forward.”
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