Zyte is a booming tech company that specializes in data extraction services, initiating and running web scraping services to help businesses, no matter how big or small, make data-driven decisions. 

As a company that relies on data, being data compliant is a priority, both so they can help their customers leverage data insights safely and so individuals can feel secure in their data rights to create a more trustworthy conversation around modern data usage.

The Challenge

Zyte works with a wide range of clients, including Fortune 500 companies and organizations that operate across the globe. Because of that expansive customer base, the company has had a ton of experience with the various data privacy and protection regulations around the world like the EU’s GDPR, California’s CCPA, and Brazil’s LGPD, among others.

Having those customers and customer data in nearly every corner of the world meant that Zyte had to comply with all those regulations, which required better visibility of data sources than has previously been possible. 

Senior Legal Counsel Victoria Vlahoyiannis, when discussing the gargantuan challenge facing a company as data-driven as Zyte is, said, “you need to understand where you and your customers physically are to be mindful of specific regulations, what your plan is, and then understand your pain points. For us, the pain point was that all the data was spread out.”

Complying with any data privacy regulation is difficult, especially for smaller companies, but with growth comes its own challenges. 

Vlahoyiannis noted, “Zyte’s been around 10 years, so we’re much more sophisticated now than we were originally, but we still need to figure out where our data is—not only ours, that we store, but also our customers’.”

The Search for a Solution

Zyte had heard about the different solutions starting to emerge onto the data privacy sphere, but had traditionally gone about data mapping and tracking data systems the old fashioned way: interviewing a whole bunch of people within the company, making a spreadsheet, and managing it–excruciatingly–by hand.

Vlahoyiannis explained, “so before Mine, [data mapping] was a headache. It was all manual and just building and working with an excel sheet. We didn't have a company-wide source of truth to really know all the vendors and systems everyone was using.”

The Zyte team knew they needed a better way to track data systems and manage risk. To them, the best way to do that was to invest in some of the cutting-edge data mapping technology they had heard about. 

“The gamechanger with MineOS was we were able to search our history, search our gmail accounts, to really delve into the company’s previous and current usage of data systems,” Vlahoyiannis told us. 

When the Zyte team saw they could get and trust those insights from MineOS’s data mapping solution, they were ready and excited to see if the platform would work for them.

The Business Impact

Beyond pushing their data discovery far beyond where it had ever been–and without having to frequently interview team members on what systems they were using–having access to that wealth of knowledge made other compliance tasks like DSR handling easier and faster.

The first step in any DSR request is knowing where the data rests so you can go and access/delete/correct it. MineOS’s continuous data classification and discovery expands all those possibilities.

“Having that automated radar checking to see what we’re signing up for, retrospectively and in real time, it’s really been amazing … While it’s a lot of work for me, it’s a lot more guaranteed that we’re getting it correct and I can see that for myself and trust the report Mine is giving me,” Vlahoyiannis said.

The end result? Discovering their data inventory was nearly double what they thought it was and the confidence to know that now, the Zyte team is getting it right. Vlahoyiannis summed her feelings for the platform up, saying “With Mine, I'm never going into any situation blind; I'm going in powered by data, which for a data company is a big deal.”

For a company that operates globally and needs to be compliant with so many different data regulations, the feeling that your privacy program has the right tools it needs to make a difference is golden.