The Future of Patient Data Sharing Protection with Tim Reilly, CEO of Zettaset: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

The Future of Patient Data Sharing Protection with Tim Reilly, CEO of Zettaset: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Saul Marquez:
Hey everyone, Saul Marquez here with the Outcomes Rocket, and thank you for tuning in once again. Today, I am joined by Tim Reilly. He is the CEO of Zettaset, a data protection provider that is transforming encryption for leading organizations. During Tim’s time with the company Zettaset has grown its product portfolio to provide data protection across on-premises, hybrid and cloud-native environments, helping keep customer data protected no matter where it is stored. We all know how important it is to keep data protected in health care whether you’re a device company, pharma provider, you name it. It’s important that we keep this stuff very protected. And he is here. Tim is going to talk to us about some of the work that they’re doing, how they’re applying it, and things that we should all be considering in this quest to keep our data protected. So, Tim, thanks so much for joining us.

Tim Reilly:
Thanks, Saul. It’s great to be here.

Saul Marquez:
And so what is it that inspired your work in data?

Tim Reilly:
It is in our mind, data without protection has lost a lot of its value. The fear of data theft will minimize or limit to a certain extent, the true benefits of all the data we have out there. As we were discussing before we started, one zettabyte is one trillion gigabytes and from now until 2025, there’s going to be a hundred and seventy-five zettabytes, by the way, Zettaset is from Zettabyte.

Saul Marquez:
Yeah.

Tim Reilly:
So I mean exponential growth.

Saul Marquez:
Yes. I mean it’s crazy.

Tim Reilly:
I just find it fascinating. Within health care specifically, they’re going to accelerate at least one and a half times faster than the rest of the verticals in the US and globally. And obviously, because data is so important to the benefit of human beings and society, you can understand why there’s a growing amount of metrics and tools to help human being and their health.

Saul Marquez:
Absolutely. And I mean, it’s amazing because even if you think about a trillion gigabytes, I include myself in a very large group of people that we don’t even know how much that is. That’s a ton. Like I saw this graph that was on Tim’s website. I was doing a little prep work before our interview. And man, I was just like, holy smokes, there’s a video on there that shows you. And it is just an enormous amount of data. Health care is at the forefront of this growth of data, and because of that, we are a target for the theft of data. And so you’ve probably experienced something at your company already where somebody is trying to break in and take something, ransomware, you name it. But there’s a problem today. And so we just have to stay ahead of it. So I’m glad you’re here today to talk through some of these things. Walk us through how Zettaset is actually adding value to the ecosystem.

Tim Reilly:
Yeah, thank you. With regards to how we can help, we believe that These are all items that make data so valuable. But if data, the level and granularity and value that you can extract from it is I think we’re still discovering and we will continue to discover it as more is generated in this artificial intelligence and machine learning and data sharing to a new level.you can’t secure it, you’re going to have the limitations, the amount of embarrassment, the financial impact, the loss and customers, the wealth of different items that come from a data breach. And of course, yes, here I call it put it on the wall of shame of Health and Human Services and the Office of Civil Rights. And nobody wants to be known that way. If we can enable the protection of this data to benefit health care providers and anyone else within the health care vertical, I think we’re doing our job.

Saul Marquez:
Agreed. And it’s expensive. I mean, if you get a data breach, I mean, it costs a ton of money. And it’s an issue, especially the bigger that you are, you know, it just becomes that much more costly. But it’s also important for smaller companies, too. If you’re building your business and you have patient data, it’s important that you keep that safe or if you have proprietary data related to your solution, that’s important, too. So talk to us, give us some examples around how you guys are improving business and helping people in health care with this team.

Tim Reilly:
Yeah, I think your question is a good one based on size. Maybe you only have a 250-bed hospital. There’s still going to have a wealth of data. And as more technology is infused into this practice, the temptation is there. And I will just say that encryption is just one aspect of the security solution. And this is probably good for all your listeners to hear as far as how I and the rest of my team view security, I view it as four pillars. So you have authentication authorization and that’s identity access management. That’s all based access control passwords. It’s all that stuff that we’ve all known for years and years and years. The second one, I’d say is audit and monitoring logging and then some level of remediation to counterattack anything that’s out there. And that’s a good one, too. The third one is backup archive restore just in case there’s some level of data loss prevention and the final pillar is crypto. So encrypting the data, managing the encryption keys, and storing them safely. So when you look at all four of those, a lot of times the smaller the company will just focus on the health care providers again than the two hundred and fifty-bed hospital. They may have passwords, they may have some monitoring, and they probably backup their data.

Tim Reilly:
But crypto really isn’t seen as a high priority. And now I think watching everybody in the news, whether it was the anthem breach, any other one that’s headlines and whatever, and executives dragged through the mud maybe loses his job, that there is a wealth of fines and you’re stuck in the spotlight in a negative way for quite a long time. So if I can help avoid that by having the data encrypted, which I’m sure your listeners are aware of if your data is encrypted, you don’t have to report and that’s prohibited. So that is, as someone wrote, that’s a get-out-of-jail-free card to a certain extent. If we can help avoid that and encrypt everything, I think we’re doing our job. So let me get one level deeper into what you were asking about. Just picture in your mind’s eye, the data center, and to you, sir, good old-fashioned box that may have hard drives on it, that can hold petabytes of data and someone can go in and walk out with it. And you might think, oh, well, that’s not very common. But over 50 percent of data breach and theft happens. So if there’s any way to make sure that data is encrypted before it walks out, I think we’ve done our job.

Tim Reilly:
Now take a step back and go to a bigger provider. We have one cloud provider that does analytics that collects all of the health care providers, like an Anthem Blue Cross, and they take that data, crunch it, then turn around and see if they can extract value, do cost minimization and see if there’s any predictability. Well, of course, if you’re now holding on to all of those different providers’ data, you are definitely a business associate and you’re going to need to protect that data. And this time it’s in the cloud and this time it’s moving. So again, now you expand out and we have another product that takes care of that. So we’ve got that little old school brick and mortar where you got the data center, you got those racks and we can protect there. Now, you may have cloud where it’s everywhere. It can be at 18 data centers. It can be global. It’s moving everywhere. We’ve got products for that. And now really for your listeners and say there’s this world of called dev-ops out there, which it’s trying to take the virtual world and take it to a whole new level. And with it comes some of your listeners may know this, — and containers. Containers are the buzzword. You no longer need a VN.

Tim Reilly:
You can just take a container that says, OK, I’m going to grab some data and I’ll take it for a little bit, and then I’ll go away. Well, in that instance, the data that they call it just float there forever. That’s the drawback of this technology. And guess what we do? Zettaset encrypts that data. So whatever form the data might be in, whether it’s cloud and this new Dymocks container or just good old-fashioned brick and mortar servers, we have an encryption. Now, the one that might be really relevant to the health care industry would be yet. So we also have encryption products that will take all the way down to a device. If a device has enough electricity and CPU power, we can encrypt whatever is on there. Can we do the crash? Absolutely. Can we do the wireless network as it gets bounced around to the data centers? Sure. So now all of a sudden you have this full range of sensor to storage, to processing that, or we’re able to protect that data. And you can just imagine how with that sense of security and compliance, which is supremely important, we now can allow any provider to have the true benefit of all the data they create.

Saul Marquez:
Excellent. And yeah, you know, encryption is one of those things that you can do to just minimize access to this data. And you think of it on a scale of ease of use to security, encryption is one of those things that if you do a good enough job enterprise wide of facilitating access points, you should be OK, right? I mean, it doesn’t become super hard to get into things. Or am I wrong?

Tim Reilly:
So two parts to that question I’d like to invoke. It’s always credentials that get compromised. You’re going to be able to get in and you’re going to be able to get to my data. And that would mean that you’re able to take the key and get it encrypted. So that’s why, like I said, to begin with, it’s part of the bigger security solution. And as you and everybody is probably seeing multifactor authentication where you log in and then someone sends you the code on your phone, you put that in and that’s two factors, then you can have the assurity that you’re dealing with as encryption key and you can get to the data. Now, should you just do it on the edge when the data first comes in? No, I think there should be almost like dikes and the canal. You need multiple ones to make sure that as people get through, there’s still the level of security because I hope everyone out there realizes there is no nothing is 100 percent nothing when it comes to security. you may get one hundred percent in one level and only 90 in another. So what that tells me is that you’ve got ninety-two percent. That’s what I like to use when I give this example, Saul. 92% is a pretty good number to protect your data. Will there be that bad actor or foreign entity that decides it’s worth getting? I mean we’ve seen it right now with – in Russian. It’s Chinese. It doesn’t matter. They’re all going to make it attempt to steal your data. It’s just what they want. So, OK. Ninety-two percent. Can I get that higher? Yeah, I can use all these different pieces of security solution and make encryption more than just what it is. What is encryption right now? It’s preventative. It’s just there to protect. And the thing we’re looking at into the future is to say, how can that now be a proactive tool? Your example of ask me about the edge? What if Saul does get compromised and they get in? Well, no matter what, even though you have my encryption key now, you still have to decrypt the data. So what if you’re able to sit there and monitor that and go, whoa, wait a minute, Saul normally doesn’t take out six petabytes of data at 2:00 in the morning. That would be a red flag. We would then suspend the account and it gives you the ability to detect that much greater and quicker. So we’ve gone from just a preventative data piece to now a detective. And I think that’s how you better incorporate encryption into crypto throughout your infrastructure because it isn’t just one place you have.

Saul Marquez:
Makes sense. That’s a good analogy to the canal. There are multiple entry points, so let’s look at all of them. And ultimately it’s a choice. How secure do you want to make this? It really becomes a choice of the organization and standards that the leadership team sets. So how would you say or maybe what would you say has been one of the biggest setbacks you’ve experienced through the work that you do and a key learning that came out of it?

Tim Reilly:
Yeah, no, I was just about to jump in on that. So when we look at encryption, I just made it sound like it’s amazing and you have to ask yourself, what is everyone doing? And there’s plenty of studies out there. And I’ll tell you, it’s roughly a third. Why have the other two-thirds done this? And there’s been enough research.. about a big one is performance. Crypto is a calculation. It is going to slow down things. And depending on how mission-critical having that data real-time is, that will make a difference. It may be a little bit of sophistication. Imagine trying to integrate that and have it scale. And a lot of times encryption is also on the box. So it’s kind of custom. Ours is not. It’s just software. You can run it on good old-fashioned white box, whatever you want, and then it’s going to be able to go wherever deployed remotely. And here’s the big one. When you say cryptographic, how many people get scared when they’re like, oh, my God, I think of the Matrix, I think of crypto and just like sneakers that movie. And people think of experts and that’s just it. You don’t have to be a crypto expert. You just want to make sure encryption then there. But it has intelligence. And with our software, you’re able to get both. It’s easy of use. Management console is easy to see everything and monitor. And you can deploy it pretty well without having to have like a full-on it IT CSO unit. That’s going to take care of it for you. So. OK, great. Tim, you’ve made it easy for me.

Tim Reilly:
What are the issues? People still struggle with the importance of it. I think there is a level of education that comes with encryption. You don’t have to say passwords, passwords, everybody show notes monitoring. Everybody knows encryption is still at that stage where there’s it said it’s about one-third of the people get it. The other two-thirds need some convincing. I like to say from a business point of view, the best lead generation I can get is a well-Publicized breach of theft. You know, you don’t want to see that happen to anybody, but that’s really what it takes to get these guys. Yeah. So what you’re kind of what you’re getting at is what I’ve learned is that if you’re going to go in and have someone understand the importance of encrypting data, they need to really see the value of what they could get out of all the data. And normally that pain point is there. And when you come in with a partner who has like ourselves with a couple of other pieces, like I said, of the solution, you’re able to help them go. All right. Well, you’re only seeing this much from your patient data. What if you were to share that with the other provider, the other doctor, and you’re able to see a better workup of your patient’s health when it’s cross amongst the dermatologist and neurologist, your pediatrician? And we all know that that doesn’t happen. So if I can tell them, I can benefit you this way and these are the metrics I think you guys can get to. Now, I’ve been sending them to understand how important it is.

Saul Marquez:
Yeah, that’s fantastic. Appreciate that. And get to know the market perspective of it. I didn’t know it was a third, but yeah, ultimately it’s oftentimes those warnings that create urgency. So it really does become our choice. Do we want to be a warning or an example? I’d rather be an example, but we don’t always make that choice, myself included. But it’s good to know kind of that’s the lay of the land. What are you most excited about, Tim?

Tim Reilly:
When I see the benefits it can get. We just did a webinar two months ago and it was focused on the opioid crisis, which I think is a horrible thing that’s really affected so many people in this world. And it’s not just to us, it’s the world. We had one with Australia where we went out and it’s actually, I think, one of the leading countries where there has been an opioid true crisis on all the citizens of that country. So what are the main proactive things that we can do as an encryption company to help everyone who’s involved with that fight, to make that one citizen, that human being, feel more protected and get them back on their feet? Because once you’re once you are addicted to that stuff. So I think we all know it’s tough to get off of it. So how can we as government, law enforcement, and health providers aid in the recovery of a human being? And what we found with our research and talking to law enforcement, from talking to social agencies within the government and the health care providers, that there is the missing piece of data sharing. Data sharing itself just amongst hospital providers is enough of a challenge, which we’ve seen. And I’m sure you’ve had some people on that. Maybe we talked about that. But now add to it, you’re going outside of health care providers. You’re now having to give this to the county of Santa Clara and you now have to give it to the local Social Security office. And well, wait a minute. That’s what we’re blowing up every regulatory compliance issue with that. So how can we help? Well, you’re going to take our level of encryption, which is, like I said, it’s at the base and it moves.

Tim Reilly:
So you’re going to be fine with that. And health care providers can say, OK, here’s data on X opioid patient. Law enforcement might be the one at the corner that busts her and takes her to the police station. And if they have the data, they know, OK, we shouldn’t be booking her. We should be calling up the social agency that’s been assigned to her and letting them know, thereby reducing beds that would be taken up in any kind of correctional facility. It really is. I mean, the trickle-down of cost-effectiveness that you can have when the data is immense and opioids is I think that’s the tip of the spear on how data sharing in health care can benefit everyone. That’s one of the areas I’m really excited about with health care because is like we talked about, it is generating more data one and a half times faster than anything else on the planet and 90 percent of data in the last two years. And that’s been created. I want you to think about that. Ninety percent of all the data that’s been created in the world came up in the last two years. So and that’s why when we talk about how amazing exponential growth is to one hundred and seventy-five zettabytes, suddenly you’re going, OK, well, how do we benefit? And personally, I get excited because the main benefit for me comes from the human aspect of it. With health care, you can say there’s government one. Of course, you can say there’s financial, but I think the greater good that you can get societies with health care.

Saul Marquez:
This is great, Tim. And I think about things like HIPPA and how we’ve used it as an excuse to not move forward on certain projects. I look at encryption as an opportunity to enable us to do more with the data that we have. Things like clinical decision support across, say, even one hospital clinical decision support one hospital, multiple devices, or you’re looking at a population level where you really want to make a difference. And Tim, you mentioned the opioid epidemic, but then there’s also things like the social determinants of health and the sharing of data to help overall health outcomes for people that need it. There are huge opportunities here. And rather than use it as an excuse to use encryption as a way forward, and I think we’re starting to see the promise that Tim is talking about here and that we’re going to be doing things a lot better with encryption. So awesome stuff, man. This has been really insightful and definitely exciting. I love if you could just give us a closing thought and then the best place that the listeners could get in touch with you if they have any questions or that they just want to connect to learn more about what you do,

Tim Reilly:
Just go to www.zettaset.com. Z E T T A S E T. And thank you for having me, Saul. So my parting thought. Data has value. It is the new oil. It is the new gold. And even if you look back historically, let’s take gold. Yeah. To protect it in the fortress. And no matter what, encryption should be viewed as one of the key defense tools in the quarter. And if you don’t use it, your last line of defense that’s easily deployed is what you’re one step closer to losing your data without it. And let’s extract as much value as we can out of the data. And to do that, that’s protected. And from that we can benefit over and above. And that’s exciting.

Saul Marquez:
It is exciting and it’s protecting it, but also the process of protecting it that enables us to do more with it. So you power up that data and that’s the really exciting part for me Tim, is like if you are doing your job of protecting it, you could do even more. So I love it. I appreciate you coming on here and inspiring us with way of encryption and what the future could look like. So, Tim, thank you for what you do, my friend.

Tim Reilly:
Hey, thank you very much, Saul. Happy to be here.

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