Cloud9, an early-stage big data venture, has won a University College Dublin (UCD) commercialisation award. Cloud9 is developing a new software service to enable organisations to effectively and efficiently desensitise personal data in-house before uploading it securely to the cloud for processing.The founder of Cloud9 is Vanessa Ayala-Rivera, a PhD student with Lero, based in UCD and working under the supervision of Professor Liam Murphy.
 
 
The Cloud9 solution is an anonymisation engine which allows companies and organisations to desensitise personal data in-house, by applying diverse data obfuscation and anonymization techniques, thereby protecting the data, before uploading it to the cloud for processing.In addition, the solution is aiming to automate the identification of sensitive information, based on self-learning algorithms, that discover new data patterns on-the-fly, to facilitate the automatic configuration of privacy policies.
 
 

Vanessa Ayala-Rivera, who is originally from Mexico, said: “Data security continues to be one of the primary obstacles that prevents the adoption of cloud services, especially in the case of software-as-a-service. Through the outputs of my research at UCD I am developing a tool to enable companies and organisations to implement a software service to protect critical information in-house, in compliance with data protection legislation, before they upload it to the cloud… I now aim to seek Enterprise Ireland commercialisation funding to help bring this technology to the next stage of development.”