Pimloc Brings AI Privacy to Microsoft’s Marketplace

Pimloc has made its Secure Redact, AI-powered privacy platform, available through the Microsoft Marketplace. It enables organisations to build an integrated privacy solution for handling video and audio data at scale. This allows organisations to protect online meetings where sensitive data may be shared. It also provides protection for those who need to capture identity documents as part of security processes.

Checking and remediating that data is often a manual process that takes time, and means data can sit around for days or weeks. Pimloc claims that its AI-powered platform has already processed over half a billion pieces of personally identifiable information (PII). From a compliance and security perspective, that is a significant gain.

Simon Randall, CEO of Pimloc, said, “Video has become one of the most sensitive and regulated data sources organizations manage, especially as AI makes it easier to search, analyze, and share at scale.

“Making Secure Redact available through the Microsoft Marketplace allows customers to easily deploy privacy-first redaction within their existing Azure environments, helping them protect individuals, meet regulatory obligations, and unlock the value of multimedia without compromising privacy.”

Protecting data in real-time is a non-trivial problem

Secure Redact is a multi-modal AI-powered privacy platform. It enables organisations to identify objects within audio, video, still images and even documents that they want to redact or obfuscate. Those objects can be faces, number plates, pieces of data such as date of birth and even words in an audio stream.

This is a non-trivial problem, especially when operating in real-time. Picking out the object to redact in a video stream requires a solution to understand what the object looks like in a noisy environment.

For example, if you are looking to blur the face of an individual, you need to separate a person in the stream from an advertising hoarding. That requires breaking the video down, frame by frame, and even pixel by pixel. It is even harder if you are looking to redact one number plate in a stream of moving traffic.

The same is true in audio. You cannot assume that the audio stream and voices are easily understood. Using an AI-powered solution allows it to redact words based on context rather than in isolation.

Once the object has been identified, it is blurred. But one size does not fit all. Organisations need to apply multiple levels of security as to who can unblur what type of data and even objects within that data. That requires is to integrate into existing security systems.

It is also important that any removal of the blurring is subject to comprehensive auditing. That is necessary to prove to compliance teams that PII has only been accessed by those who have the right permissions.

Compliance teams are also able to work with the system to define what needs to be obfuscated. This ensures that organisations can prove that they are meeting their legal obligations to protect data.

Marketplaces open up a wider market

Go-to-market planning for software vendors can be expensive. Building a partner base, training them and then waiting for them to deliver customers takes time. That said, Pimloc has already built an interesting customer base that includes the NHS and G4S in the UK, and Mass.gov in the US.

Gaining access to the Microsoft Marketplace gives it other options. It can reach a much wider customer base of mid-size and small businesses. It will be interesting to see how much this drives new business.

But there are other marketplaces that it should also be on. In the UK, the UK Government Digital Marketplace is used by local and central government departments. With many councils running their own CCTV and other services, this is a much more focused marketplace than Microsoft’s.

Across Europe, each country runs its own digital marketplace. The EU wants European companies to focus on digital sovereignty and European tech businesses. Getting into many of those would be a smart move.

In the US, getting FedRAMP certified would open up state and federal government contract opportunities. Additionally, the US Government doesn’t have a centralised digital marketplace. Instead, it uses a range of options. Getting listed on all those would be helpful.

Getting on all of these takes time and money, especially where there are certification hoops to jump through. The question is how quickly Pimloc can get on those marketplaces? Also, is it better off with a traditional partner rather than a marketplace model?

Enterprise Times: What does this mean?

There are very few companies that are delivering a multi-modal solution for video, audio, images and documents. That’s partly due to the complexity, as Enterprise Times explored in a podcast with Duncan Curtis from Sama.

Is this the moment when Pimloc takes ownership of the market? It has just a small number of competitors capable of delivering a real multi-modal AI-powered privacy platform. With increasing attention on privacy from regulators, it has an opportunity to grow its market share. It will be interesting to see if this move is the start point for rapid growth.

The post Pimloc Brings AI Privacy to Microsoft’s Marketplace appeared first on Enterprise Times.