Companies that work with sensitive data are often sitting on a wealth of information they’re restricted from using, but Decentriq is helping these companies tap into the value of this data—without sharing it. Founded in 2019, the Swiss company offers an enterprise-grade software as a service platform for confidential data collaboration. On the platform, participants can create data clean rooms, which are neutral spaces for multiple parties to work on joint datasets where compliance, control, and data confidentiality are enforced by advanced privacy technologies. With its data clean rooms, Decentriq is not only making data collaboration simpler, but in many cases, it’s also creating the opportunity for multiple groups to come together and use sensitive data for the first time—using Microsoft Azure confidential computing. Since migrating to the cloud and accelerating its confidential computing journey with Azure, the company has made collaboration on sensitive datasets scalable for the first time and helped customers reach a range of milestones, including doubling clickthrough rates for digital advertising. And this is just the beginning.
“There are multiple categories of data clean rooms, but we differentiate ourselves by our use of Azure confidential computing, which makes our data clean rooms among the most secure and privacy-preserving clean rooms in the market.”
Pierre Cholet, Head of Business Development, Decentriq
By working together in data clean rooms, companies can collaborate with confidence using their most sensitive datasets. Healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies have already demonstrated success working together on Decentriq’s platform to improve their services and compliantly use patient data for crucial healthcare research while personal information remains completely private.
The company started with bare-metal infrastructure but recognized the potential to accelerate product development by moving to the cloud and reducing time spent monitoring and maintaining infrastructure. A pioneer in highly secure data collaboration, Decentriq wanted to modernize with a cloud provider that held an equally high bar for protecting data. As Juan Baron, Director of Business Development and Strategy at Decentriq, notes, “Merging datasets between two different data owners is often not feasible because of legal implications around consent and data ownership.”
With Azure confidential computing, Microsoft met the necessary trust and security safeguards for the diverse datasets used in data clean rooms while also offering Decentriq cost savings, scalability, and uniquely available resources through Azure. “There are multiple categories of data clean rooms, but we differentiate ourselves by our use of Azure confidential computing, which makes our data clean rooms among the most secure and privacy-preserving clean rooms in the market,” says Pierre Cholet, Head of Business Development at Decentriq.
Eliminating trust barriers and maximizing flexibility
The use of Azure confidential computing in Decentriq data clean rooms makes it practically impossible for an unauthorized party to interact with highly sensitive datasets—Decentriq included. It also eliminates the strain of Decentriq and its data clean room users needing to establish trust across participants. Customers who use these data clean rooms have told the company that they sleep better at night, without concerns about data protection keeping them awake.
Having moved the bulk of its compute and storage infrastructure to Azure, the company relies on Azure Blob Storage to store large and sensitive datasets, including encrypted customer data, in the cloud. Decentriq’s Azure environment also offers great computational flexibility for data collaboration. “Our users can run any type of highly sophisticated data science model, including machine learning, through R, Python, and SQL,” says Baron. “These complex models help them extract significant value out of the data collaboration.”
Since starting its journey with Azure for confidential computing five years ago, Decentriq has expanded and evolved its compute infrastructure. The company uses DC-series Azure virtual machines (VMs) with Intel® Software Guard Extensions and is exploring a move to new Azure VMs by the end of 2023. It’s currently in touch with the Azure confidential computing team to discuss adoption of DCasv5 VMs from AMD with SEV-SNP encryption. Decentriq also participates in private previews of upcoming VMs, processors, and other resources within Azure that offer compelling new capabilities. “Azure offering NVIDIA’s new GPU with built-in confidential computing for advanced AI workloads yet again helps us remain at the tip of innovation, and we know Azure will continue to make these cutting-edge technologies available to us,” says Cholet.
Transforming the advertising industry with better insights, combined datasets
Decentriq builds user experiences across a variety of industries through its data clean rooms. Among its most active sectors is media and advertising, where it enables brands, publishers, and retailers to increase advertising return on investment by working collaboratively on first-party customer data to uncover actionable insights—like building joint audiences for targeting or measuring the success of campaigns. “Part of the impetus for the adoption of data clean rooms in advertising is the deprecation of third-party cookies,” explains Baron. “Sensitive first-party data is putting a lot of emphasis in terms of data ownership and control that can be enabled through our approach to confidential computing.”
Using Azure confidential computing, Decentriq’s data clean rooms help enforce users’ preferences and consent when it comes to advertising, with strict controls for data owners and safeguards for keeping personal data encrypted and inaccessible throughout its life cycle. This helps ensure that the ads people see across platforms are what they want and what they have agreed to.
Goldbach, a major advertising and media production company, and Goldbach neXT, its central technology and service competence center, agree with Decentriq’s approach. Their teams say that third-party cookies—which have underpinned internet advertising for 25 years and which multiple web browsers are phasing out—get overused. They view highly secure environments like data clean rooms as the best way to properly use data while still delivering the right message to the right people at the right time.
“We collaborate with business partners, including advertisers, and achieving this requires a top-notch confidential computing environment,” says Marcin Barcinski, Head of Data at Goldbach. “That’s why we partnered with Decentriq and employ its platform for highly secure data merging and processing in support of our online advertising business, creating maximum value and return on investment."
Using Decentriq’s data clean rooms, brands can confidently bring in sensitive data from their customer data platforms, including customers‘ ad preferences and settings, intersect that with Goldbach’s proprietary data, and extrapolate aggregated insights, which they then use for targeting segments. “Especially in the European Union, data protection laws require a high level of privacy technology, which is the primary use case for data clean rooms,” says Barcinski. “By combining protected data with partner data in Decentriq data clean rooms, we can deliver more effective advertising while helping ensure the safety of the information.”
Decentriq values Goldbach’s position as a champion for data protection and confidential computing in advertising and continues to build new solutions for the market with Goldbach, including no-code data clean rooms. “Together with Goldbach, we’ve built a way for data clean room users to activate audiences for advertising in a visual interface, without needing coding experience, while we manage the protection of the rich datasets,” says Baron.
Extending a nascent technology while redefining industries
Decentriq cites multiple benefits from its adoption of Azure confidential computing and other Azure resources. These include larger global scale and availability, exciting new cloud business models, and the strong reputation and shared expertise of Microsoft and partners like Goldbach. “There are more cloud providers catching up on confidential computing, but we’re proudly sticking with Microsoft, which has the highest level of maturity in this technology,” says Cholet.
Decentriq has achieved key performance indicators related to making its sophisticated, Azure-based platform approachable and convenient for everyday users. Goldbach, for one, used the Decentriq platform to increase the performance of advertising campaigns. In turn, Decentriq is redefining what it means to use first-party data for advertising. “In many cases, we’ve seen advertising conversion rates increase by at least 60 percent and clickthrough rates more than double on the performance of creative assets,” says Baron. Adds Barcinski, “With Azure confidential computing, Decentriq’s solution marks one of the first times advertisers can collaborate on a platform that can handle large amounts of sensitive information in a highly secure way. And Decentriq continues to introduce features like automation capabilities that help us enhance our products.”
Simple and highly secure data collaboration has historically been an unreachable dream for most companies, but Decentriq is already making this a reality. At the same time, confidential computing offers so many advantages that the company expects uptake of its data clean rooms to skyrocket. Cholet concludes, “We’re extremely bullish, and Microsoft’s investments in Azure confidential computing across its regions will help our data clean rooms play a strategic role for almost any organization going forward.”
“In many cases, we’ve seen advertising conversion rates increase by at least 60 percent and clickthrough rates more than double on the performance of creative assets.”
Juan Baron, Director of Business Development and Strategy, Decentriq
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