Resilience is the real innovation - A founder's perspective on building enduring tech companies in New Zealand

Techday NZ

3 days ago

In my 24 years of building and running technology companies in New Zealand, I've learned that we often celebrate the wrong thing. Often the thing that gets the real attention is the flashy idea, the "lightbulb moment." But ideas are plentiful. The real innovation - the kind that builds enduring companies - is resilience. It's the grit to see a real business problem and the tenacity to solve it, even when your initial plan gets thrown out the window.
The story of Datamasque, a company born from within Spectrum, is a perfect example of this.
The problem that wasn't going away
Around 2015, we saw a fundamental change emerging within our enterprise clients and the rise of data virtualization technologies. Capitalising on this growth Spectrum worked with Actifio (now a Google technology) and later with our current key partner Cohesity. Data virtualization was a game-changer for development workflows. It gave teams the ability to spin up copies of production data for development and testing, Quality Assurance and user acceptance testing. However, this ability to spin up new environments created a massive, and at that time unmanaged, security risk.
With GDPR on the horizon and data privacy becoming a board-level conversation, it was clear that this data sprawl was a ticking time bomb. Every developer wanted their own slice of the pie, but every new copy created a massive unmanaged security risk and every new stream of work expanded the company's attack surface exponentially. We saw clients with a single production database spawning 50+ copies, once even 90!, across their non-production environments. Each copy was a complete replica, full of sensitive, personally identifiable information (PII). A massive unplanned risk.
The first plan, and the first pivot
Our initial approach was pragmatic. We looked at third-party data masking tools, but they were incredibly complicated and expensive for the use cases our clients had. They didn't integrate cleanly into the modern, agile workflows our clients were adopting. So, Spectrum decided to invest in our own development team to build a new tool that solved the actual problem. Our initial plan was ambitious; we saw the emerging cloud and data management marketplaces as a potential route to a global audience, as such we started building with the idea of plugging directly into that ecosystem. We committed the resources and took the bet.
As is often the case with cutting-edge technology, the timing wasn't quite right. The marketplace ecosystem was still in its early stages, and the deep integration points we needed hadn't been developed yet. This is the point where many ventures die; your core commercial strategy hits a roadblock, and it's easy to write off the investment. But resilience means you don't quit on the problem just because your first path is blocked.
How resilience forged real innovation
That initial roadblock forced us to rethink everything. It was the best thing that could have happened.
We pivoted. Instead of building an integrated feature for someone else's platform, we decided to build a standalone, independent product - Datamasque. A tool that could be pointed at any database, in any environment, and simply work.
This pivot forced us to solve harder problems. We couldn't rely on a host platform, so we had to perfect our own architecture. We had to build a solution that was not just functional, but flexible and powerful in its own right. This is how we developed "synthetically identical data" a unique solution for data masking that transforms sensitive information into artificial yet highly realistic data. This masked data maintains its structural integrity and realism for effective testing and development, while being irreversible and anonymous to ensure privacy and compliance.
We also created the unique solutions, like our "run secrets" feature, which optionally allows masked data consistency across different environments to remain the same for the same original input, regardless of where it's used. This allows organizations to leverage production-like data for innovation without compromising security or regulatory requirements. The product that emerged from this period of challenge was ten times better than the one we had originally planned.
Coming full circle, a partnership built on shared history
Datamasque was split out from Spectrum in 2020, has gone on to win multiple awards, and serve major international clients. It is a testament to the culture of innovation we've fostered at Spectrum over the last 24 years. In the international context New Zealand is a small pond, however Spectrum looks after some of its biggest fish by building and caring for mission-critical infrastructure in some of our largest enterprises. These enterprises have the same data security requirements as their international counterparts, so the product very quickly went global. And we couldn't be more proud!
Ultimately, the marketplace strategy proved it was the right one, and the story has now come full circle; Spectrum's storage partner Cohesity has grown into a market leader, and Datamasque is now a proud member of the Cohesity Data Security Alliance. Now, as part of Spectrum's renewed focus, we have become a key sales and implementation partner for Datamasque in New Zealand. We don't just understand the data privacy problem academically; we have lived it, solved it, and built a world-class company to address it. We are now bringing this powerful, Kiwi-born innovation back to the enterprises it was originally designed to protect.
If your organisation is looking to unlock the value of its data for development, testing, or AI without compromising on security and privacy, then we should talk. As a key partner for both Datamasque and Cohesity, Spectrum is uniquely positioned to help you manage your data estate securely and efficiently. We have the solutions, because we had the resilience to build them.