Real-Time Data Flow Visualization
Built a real-time PII data flow map showing exactly how sensitive data moves through an organization's systems.
The Visibility Gap
Compliance teams tasked with protecting sensitive data face a fundamental visibility problem: they cannot protect what they cannot see. In modern organizations, PII flows through dozens of microservices, gets replicated across databases, passes through caching layers, and lands in third-party integrations — all driven by engineering decisions that happen far from the compliance team’s view. Static architecture diagrams go stale within weeks, and manual data flow documentation is perpetually incomplete.
Interactive Flow Mapping
I built the visualization on React Flow, rendering an interactive graph where nodes represent systems — microservices, databases, SaaS integrations, caching layers — and edges represent observed data flows carrying sensitive information. The graph is not manually drawn; it is generated from the PII detection engine’s continuous scanning results, so the map reflects the actual state of the system rather than someone’s best guess. Users can filter by PII type, drill into specific data paths, and trace how a particular piece of sensitive data propagates from its source through every downstream system.
Live Updates
WebSocket connections push updates to the visualization as the detection engine discovers new data flows. When engineers deploy code that introduces a new API call passing user emails to an analytics service, the flow map updates within minutes — giving compliance teams near-real-time awareness of changes to their data landscape. This transforms data governance from a periodic review exercise into a continuous monitoring practice, where new exposure surfaces as it happens rather than at the next audit.
The most useful compliance tool is not a checklist — it is a live map that answers “where is this data right now?” in seconds instead of days.