AWS Announces AWS Clean Rooms

Companies across multiple industries increasingly look to complement their data with external business partners’ data to build a complete view of their business. In the advertising industry, for example, brands, media publishers, and their partners need to collaborate using datasets that are stored across many different channels and applications to improve the relevance of their campaigns and better engage with consumers. At the same time, these companies also want to protect sensitive consumer information and reduce or eliminate the sharing of raw data. To achieve this, one company often has to provide a copy of their user-level data to their partners and rely on contractual agreements to prevent misuse. Data clean rooms can help solve this challenge by allowing multiple parties to combine and analyze their data in a protected environment, where participants are unable to see each other’s raw data. But clean rooms are hard to build, requiring complex privacy controls, specialized tools to protect each participant’s data, and months of development time customizing analytics tools. When a new collaborator is added, or a different type of analysis is needed, companies have to spend even more development time. Then, these companies repeatedly have to copy and upload their data into storage environments outside of their control, which increases costs and risks exposing sensitive information. Companies prefer to limit data movement as much as possible, usually leading to less collaboration and missed opportunities to generate new business insights.