Building a Complete and Lovable Data Privacy Platform: DataGrail’s Product Vision

At DataGrail, we work with the world’s largest brands to transform how they manage data privacy.

We’ve heard from hundreds of privacy and security leaders, and the message is clear: data privacy is rapidly evolving, and spreadsheets, email, and manual work won’t cut it anymore.

The data privacy evolution is only accelerating thanks to changing consumer expectations, growing concerns about generative AI, and the passing of new laws that attempt to address both.

Regulators have passed 60 new laws globally in the last year alone—leading Gartner to predict that by the end of 2024, 75% of the global population will have its personal data covered by privacy regulations, up from just 10% in 2020!

More than ever before, buyers want choice and control over their privacy. They want to buy from brands they trust, and privacy leaders are all too aware how quickly hard-earned trust can be lost.

At DataGrail, we see a massive opportunity to not only help privacy leaders address the challenges of evolving privacy needs with innovative software, but also to turn privacy into a differentiator for our customers. This is what inspires our product vision.

Product Vision

DataGrail is a complete and lovable data privacy platform that is a cornerstone in a best-in-class risk management ecosystem.

Let’s take a deeper look at each piece of our vision, the steps we’ve taken to make it a reality, and what’s in store for the future.

A Complete Data Privacy Platform

Foundationally, a complete data privacy platform must provide robust and integrated solutions for each of the four pillars of data privacy management:

1. Data discovery and mapping
2. Data subject request management
3. Consent management
4. Privacy risk assessments

Too many privacy teams today are still working with a menagerie of point solutions that don’t integrate, and fragile in-house tools that no one remembers how to fix. Our strategy is to deliver a comprehensive privacy platform that goes deep on all four pillars of data privacy and allows our customers to consolidate point solutions and reduce cost, complexity, and risk.

In the last year, we’ve delivered several powerful new capabilities to deepen our data privacy platform:

• Responsible data discovery: The most secure and accurate ML-powered data discovery and classification technology on the market.
• Automated privacy workflows: The fastest, most flexible way to scale privacy request fulfillment without scaling your costs.
• DataGrail Consent: A completely overhauled consent management platform (CMP) that delivers automated, verifiable consent compliance across all your domains.
• AI Governance: A powerful solution that uses DataGrail’s robust system detection and discovery capabilities to discover shadow AI systems, manage AI-specific subject requests, and more.

Meeting the ever-evolving privacy needs of our customers means ensuring we’re a complete platform not just for today, but for the future. Here are a few key areas of innovation to help ensure that:

Unification of privacy preferences. Privacy today is a disjointed and broken experience for consumers and privacy teams alike. We’re building for a world where privacy requests and consent preferences are unified through a simple control panel that looks and feels like an extension of your brand, not something bolted on. At the same time, privacy and security teams will finally be able to maintain a complete record of every consumer choice and the ability to automate actions across their ecosystem anytime there’s a change. We call it Unified Choice, and it’s going to be a game changer.

Industry-leading risk insights. The proliferation of data in internal databases and third-party SaaS apps creates an amazing opportunity for data mapping and discovery. DataGrail is already equipped with best-in-class system detection and data discovery capabilities to find sensitive data throughout your environment. We’ll continue to mature our data discovery capabilities and more deeply embed them into the risk intelligence layer of our platform, so DataGrail can better draw attention to new privacy risks and even automate the response.

A Loveable Data Privacy Platform

Beyond completeness, we strive to build products that privacy, legal, security and marketing teams will actually want to use.

Admittedly, the privacy software industry isn’t exactly known for building loveable products. Teams often feel they have to choose between overstuffed legacy platforms way too reminiscent of 90’s tax software, or highly-technical products that require API access to perform even simple tasks like updating a cookie consent banner.

Our product team is committed to building products that give everyday users intuitive, easy-to-use solutions to common privacy jobs, while also providing advanced technology and enterprise extensibility for complex problem solving. This includes robust API controls, programmatic management, and fully customizable workflows.

Here are three key areas we’ll continue investing in to ensure DataGrail remains the most loveable privacy platform on the market.

Zero-click automation. Automation has been a foundation of the DataGrail product vision since the beginning and has helped drive DataGrail Request Manager to the #1 DSR product in the market. Our vision is to continue to deepen and expand our automation capabilities to eliminate as much toil as possible for privacy practitioners and reduce the risk of human error.

Real-time everything. Real time should extend into everything we do. We believe in a future where providing real time responses to privacy requests can become a brand differentiator. As customers experience a fast, pain-free process, it will build goodwill and convey privacy maturity.

Industry-standard reporting. Analytics, dashboard, and reporting are important to not only solve the task at hand, but also allow privacy leaders to tout the benefits and ROI of using a privacy platform. We envision universal, lovable dashboards that become the standard that regulators and auditors look for. In addition, we aim to provide fully customized reporting, supported by powerful privacy analytics under the hood.

A Cornerstone in Best-in-Class Risk Management

As the privacy market has matured, some of our competitors have taken the strategy of going wide and shallow in an attempt to cover more use cases across adjacent areas like governance or data security.

We’ve seen over and over again how this approach results in over-promised, under-delivered products that leave customers paying for insufficient solutions and unadopted shelfware.

Instead, our vision is to provide the best-of-breed privacy platform that is a cornerstone in your risk management ecosystem and operates in lock step with your governance, compliance, and security platforms.

To accomplish this, we’ll continue to invest in new technologies that further extend privacy into the risk-management ecosystem and help customers harness the power of generative AI with ease.

Shift privacy left with APIs. APIs unleash an incredible amount of creativity and customization for our customers. With a full-featured public API, our customers can create bespoke privacy centers, custom orchestration, and build new integrations for our platform. For innovative privacy engineers and developer teams who want privacy to “shift left,” we will provide robust, global APIs to support them.

Ubiquitous AI. We will continue to leverage machine learning AI while expanding our capabilities in the product with generative AI. At the same time, as a privacy and data solution, we have a unique opportunity to assist our customers as they employ generative AI in their companies. Our platform will provide AI risk management by assisting with discovery, monitoring, and controls of AI technology.

As we look forward to the future, we’re building for a world where brands can meet consumer privacy expectations with the support of a complete, intelligent and automated data privacy platform and consumers can engage with full confidence that their choices are being respected.

Ready to see DataGrail in Action? Take an interactive tour here and if you’re interested in learning more, you can request a demo with our team here.