Ingesting and Processing Government Data with Merit’s Charlie Summers

Merit’s verified identity platform brings visibility, liquidity, and trust to people-data, giving organizations the clarity to make better-informed decisions, engage with individuals effectively, and pursue their mission efficiently. Merit works with trusted private, state, and municipal organizations to solve critical real-world problems in sectors such as workforce development, emergency services, licensing, education, and defense readiness.

Merit ingests and processes highly sensitive data from a variety of government agencies. Privacy and security are of the utmost importance, but they must also balance data utility. To support customer and business needs, Merit uses a combination of off the shelf data stack tools and technologies along with off homegrown techniques around encryption and encryption key management.

Staff engineer and data tech lead, Charlie Summers, joins the show to breakdown Merit’s data stack, the life of data, the challenges they’ve faced with protecting sensitive data, and the ways they secure customer data.

Topics:

• Can you talk about Merit and your role there?
• What kind of data are you typically dealing with at Merit?
• What’s your data stack?
• Can you take me through the life of a piece of data?
• What’s the scale of the data you’re working with? How big is this data set?
• What challenges have you faced with securing sensitive data while using this stack?
• What tools, technologies, or techniques are you using to protect the data?
• How are you balancing the security of the data with the actual utility?
• How do you control access to the data?
• How does auditing work? Is every time the data touched logged in some way?
• How did you think through build versus buy?
• Why is privacy and security a priority for Merit?
• What future technologies in this space are you particularly excited about?

Resources:

• Careers at Merit