Vanessa Ayala-Rivera, Lero

Cloud9 wins UCD commercialisation award

Life
Vanessa Ayala-Rivera, Lero

12 May 2017

Cloud9, an early-stage data security venture, was named overall winner of the 2017 UCD School of Computer Science Innovation Sprint Programme

The ninth one-day initiative designed and delivered by UCD’s technology transfer and enterprise development teams at NovaUCD. Each innovation sprint programme aims to encourage the development of commercial outputs, arising from specific research areas or Schools, by engaging with UCD researchers at an earlier stage in the commercialisation process.

Cloud9 is developing a new software service to enable organisations to effectively and efficiently desensitise personal data in-house before uploading it securely to the cloud for processing.

The company was founded by Vanessa Ayala-Rivera is a PhD student in the Performance Engineering Laboratory at UCD’s School of Computer Science and a member of Lero, the Irish Software Research Centre.

The Cloud9 solution is an anonymisation engine which allows companies and organisations to desensitise personal data in-house, by applying diverse data obfuscation and anonymization techniques, thereby protecting the data, before uploading it to the cloud for processing.

In addition, the solution is aiming to automate the identification of sensitive information, based on self-learning algorithms, that discover new data patterns on-the-fly, to facilitate the automatic configuration of privacy policies.

Ayala-Rivera, who is originally from Mexico, said: “Data security continues to be one of the primary obstacles that prevents the adoption of cloud services, especially in the case of software-as-a-service. Through the outputs of my research at UCD I am developing a tool to enable companies and organisations to implement a software service to protect critical information in-house, in compliance with data protection legislation, before they upload it to the cloud… I now aim to seek Enterprise Ireland commercialisation funding to help bring this technology to the next stage of development.”

During the one-day 2017 UCD School of Computer Science Innovation Sprint Programme a number of internal and external technology and business professionals collaborated with the UCD researchers to explore the commercial potential of transforming their research ideas into early-stage business ideas.

More than 45 researchers with over 35 business ideas have taken part in the nine one-day Innovation Sprint Programmes delivered to date at UCD. The other programmes have focused on business opportunities arising from research taking place in areas such as: Agri-Food; CleanWeb; Data Science; Engineering; ICT; IoT; Life Science; and MedTech.

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