Data is becoming as precious a commodity as oil. Sales, marketing, dev ops, IT—nearly every operation depends wholly on data of one sort or another. But data is often extraordinarily sensitive. All it takes is a dozen digits in the wrong hands to ruin a person’s life. So when you direly need to analyze data, but need to keep it private and secure, what do you do? 

Our guest on this edition of UpTech Report started his own company. Ian Coe is the founder and CEO of Tonic, a company that, in their own words, “mimics your production data to create de-identified, realistic, and safe data for your test environments.” 

Ian stops by to tell us how he originally conceived of the idea while trying to resolve some IT issues at a large bank that would have necessitated giving the developers data they certainly couldn’t have—if they couldn’t find another way. Now that solution is being offered to companies around the world.