SAP HANA goes private
Stephan Ch. Kessler, Jens Hoff, Johann-Christoph Freytag · Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment · 2019
Over the last 20 years, the progress of information technology has allowed many companies to generate, integrate, store, and analyze data of unprecedented size and complexity. In many cases, this data is personal data and how it can be used is therefore subject to laws that depend on the specific countries and application domains. For example, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) introduced in the European Union imposes strict rules on how personal data can be processed. Analyzing personal data can create tremendous value, but at the same time companies must ensure that they remain legally compliant. Unfortunately, existing systems offer only limited or no support at all for processing personal data in a privacy-aware manner. Approaches that have emerged from the academic and industrial research environments need to be integrated into large systems (like enterprise systems) in a manageable and scalable way. In many IT environments, it is also desirable and necessary to combine and to integrate personal data with other (non-personal) data in a seamless fashion. In this paper, we present the first steps that SAP has taken to provide its database management system SAP HANA with privacy-enhanced processing capabilities, referred to in the following as SAP HANA Data Anonymization. Various goals on both the conceptual and technical levels were followed with the aim of providing SAP customers today with an integrated processing environment for personal and non-personal data.