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Mark Rowan

Data Sentinel is a data trust and compliance platform that helps businesses continuously manage their data privacy compliance, governance, and quality in real time. Data Sentinel’s proprietary deep learning discovery technology illuminates the true nature of an organization’s data across all sources and systems, monitoring, measuring, and remediating the data to ensure compliance with company policies and evolving data management privacy regulations.

Tell us about yourself?

I’ve been in the “data” business for over 20 years, initially with IBM and then establishing, growing, and successfully exiting a data-centric consultancy called Stream Integration. The growth and constant change that we see in this industry is what attracted me to it and has kept me engaged in it for those 20-plus years.

It was through the experience of implementing many best-of-breed data management technologies in the Fortune 1000 market that my business partner and I were inspired to create Data Sentinel.

If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

Don’t start a company two months before a global pandemic!

What problem does your business solve?

Data Sentinel Home Screen
Data Sentinel Home Screen

 

We are addressing what we call the perfect storm in the data world. Data has grown and continues to grow at incredible rates within organizations, especially those that work with the public/consumers. Managing this growth or governing data in this environment has become very challenging. This coupled with the advent of global data privacy laws, the surge in data breaches within companies, and the increase in consumer litigation due to misuse of data, organizations need solutions like Data Sentinel to automate the governance and compliance of their data.

What is the inspiration behind your business?

Over the last 10 years prior to Data Sentinel, we had been implementing other best-of-breed technologies to help companies manage and govern their data. Most of these technologies didn’t operate as advertised, and they were very expensive to implement. We built Data Sentinel to resolve these challenges, specifically in the mid to large enterprise space with companies that hold and manage massive amounts of consumer data.

What is your magic sauce?

There are a few things that make us different than what’s in the market today.

  1. We offer our technology as a managed service, taking on the responsibility of owning the compliance and governance problem for our clients.
  2. We use extremely sophisticated machine learning technology that enables Data Sentinel to “learn” our clients’ data.
  3. Data Sentinel has been built to scale from the smallest of regional businesses to the largest global enterprises.

What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?

As privacy laws become ubiquitous around the world, Data Sentinel is positioned to become a leader in the automation of data privacy regulatory compliance.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?

As a later-stage startup, the greatest challenge is in sales and the consistency of sales. We are constantly adjusting our go-to-market strategy and value proposition with the intent of discovering the market patterns in this new and evolving data privacy space.

How can people get involved?

Please contact us to see a demo of Data Sentinel or to chat with one of our data governance and data privacy advisors. We can be reached at info@data-sentinel.com