Tokenize-Once, Orchestrate Everywhere: How Skyflow + Camunda Scales Compliance
This is a guest blog from the Camunda team sharing how Skyflow can be used to secure sensitive data in the Camunda process orchestration platform.
In regulated industries like financial services and healthcare, engineering teams are constantly balancing two competing priorities:
- Modernize and automate complex, end-to-end processes.
- Protect sensitive data and comply with strict regulations.
Every time a process touches personally identifiable information (PII) or protected health information (PHI), the number of systems, teams, and vendors that can see that data grows. Risk grows with it.
This challenge intensifies with agentic AI. When autonomous agents orchestrate workflows that require access to sensitive data, traditional static security (redaction, DLP, encryption-at-rest) no longer works. Agents need context to reason and act in real-time, but legacy security destroys that context or fails to protect data during execution.
The Camunda Skyflow Connector is designed to help break that trade-off. It lets you orchestrate business processes with Camunda while keeping sensitive data protected by Skyflow’s data privacy platform. This means your engineering team can move fast without compliance slowing them down.
The Problem: Distributed Sensitive Data Creates Cleartext Risk
In a typical regulated organization, critical processes like customer onboarding and KYC, claims handling, prior authorization, credit decisioning and collections, span dozens of systems and teams. Over time, sensitive data has been copied and integrated into core systems of record, CRM and case management tools, analytics and data lakes and more. This leads to familiar pain points like:
- Rising compliance scope because more systems fall under GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA or local regulations.
- Slower change because every new integration or cloud service triggers security reviews and data protection work.
- Higher breach impact since incidents are harder to contain because sensitive data has been spread widely.
The underlying problem is architectural. The question now becomes, how can we orchestrate processes end-to-end, without pushing cleartext sensitive data everywhere?
The Solution: Isolate Data, Orchestrate Processes. Not the Cleartext
Camunda is used to orchestrate complex, long-running processes across people, systems, AI agents, and automation tools. Skyflow is built to protect and govern sensitive data using polymorphic tokenization and de‑identification.
The Camunda Skyflow Connector enables Camunda to manage the end-to-end process across different tasks (including handoffs) and SLAs, while creating an auditable trail. Skyflow isolates sensitive data, replaces sensitive values with secure tokens, then safely re‑identifies them when necessary. In practice, that means your process can:
- De‑identify sensitive data (tokenization) as soon as it enters the workflow. The process sends selected fields (for example, name, SSN, account number) to Skyflow. Skyflow detects sensitive data and replaces it with tokens.
- The Camunda-orchestrated process continues with tokenized data instead of raw PII/PHI, through downstream systems and integrations.
- Re‑identify (revealing where permitted) only at carefully controlled moments where real values are truly needed (for example, generating regulated documents or writing back to a system of record). At specific steps, the process can request the original values back from Skyflow. This is used sparingly—for example, to populate a final notice, fulfill a regulatory request, or update a compliant system of record.
Inside Camunda, this is a reusable Camunda 8 outbound connector with an element template for Camunda Modeler that can be dropped onto a Business Process Model and Notation - BPMN‑modeled process and configured on a service task—just like other connectors for REST, messaging, or AI services—so modelers can reuse it across many use cases without rebuilding it from scratch each time.
For technical teams, the full implementation details and configuration options are available in the Camunda Marketplace Listing.
Business Outcomes for Regulated Organizations:
- Shrink Your Sensitive Data Footprint: By de-identifying data early in the process, you reduce the number of systems that ever see cleartext PII/PHI. Many downstream services can operate entirely on tokens:
- CRM and case tools can track customers and cases using tokens.
- Analytics platforms can analyze volumes and flows without holding raw identifiers.
- Third-party vendors can work with minimized data that’s safe to share.
- AI agents can reason and act on tokenized data through the Skyflow Connector, preserving context and referential integrity without exposing actual sensitive data
This directly reduces compliance scope and simplifies security reviews for new integrations and cloud services.
- Improve Compliance and Audit Readiness: Instead of scattering bespoke masking and redaction code across different applications, data protection becomes:
- Centralized in Skyflow’s platform.
- Visible in your BPMN models: you can literally see where data is de‑identified or re‑identified.
- Consistent across processes, products, and geographies.
When regulators, auditors, or internal risk teams ask “Where is this data exposed?” you can point to Skyflow policies and logs, and Camunda’s end-to-end process models and history.
- Accelerate Modernization and Cloud Adoption: Sensitive data often blocks teams from moving workloads to the cloud, introducing new SaaS applications and experimenting with AI or new automation tools.
With Camunda orchestrating the process and Skyflow protecting the data, you can:- Keep the most sensitive details in a controlled vault.
- Orchestrate modern cloud services using tokens.
- Adopt new technologies without dramatically expanding your cleartext data footprint.
- Enable Safer AI and Analytics Use Cases: As organizations roll out AI and advanced analytics, Skyflow provides granular control over data flows at runtime, enabling AI and analytics operations on tokens and non-sensitive attributes when appropriate, while keeping sensitive data isolated when it shouldn't be accessed.
This approach unblocks production AI projects by letting security and data teams grant granular, policy-driven access while maintaining runtime visibility and compliance.
Concrete Use Cases with Camunda and Skyflow
Below are some practical scenarios where Camunda customers could use the Skyflow connector to unlock value quickly.
- KYC & Customer Onboarding (Financial Services): Banks/fintechs use Camunda to orchestrate onboarding steps such as data collection, ID checks, sanctions screening, system writes, and communications. KYC requires handling sensitive PII (IDs, SSNs, addresses), which often spreads across systems, increasing regulatory exposure.
How the connector helps:- Early tokenization of sensitive fields via Skyflow.
- Downstream systems (core banking, CRM, analytics) operate on tokens.
- Skyflow offers field level controls over who sees, what, and when. (As long as the user requesting the information has permission to see it, in the context that they are requesting to see the data, they will be able to do so.)
Business impact: Reduced PII footprint, faster compliance reviews, stronger regulatory posture.
- Healthcare Claims & Prior Authorization: Insurers/providers use Camunda to coordinate intake, EMRs, claims engines, and utilization reviews. PHI is regulated (HIPAA), and cloud workflows increase scrutiny over PHI movement.
How the connector helps:- Tokenizes PHI after intake.
- Most workflow logic and integrations run on tokenized data.
- Only legally required systems receive re‑identified PHI.
Business impact: Easier cloud adoption, clear PHI boundaries, improved auditability.
- Insurance Claims & First Notice of Loss (FNOL): Camunda orchestrates FNOL, adjuster coordination, partner interactions, and settlement steps. Sensitive policyholder data flows through many partners and legacy systems.
How the connector helps:- Early de‑identification of policyholder and payment data.
- Partners and non-core systems work with tokens.
- Re‑identification happens only for required outputs (settlements, regulatory reports).
Business impact: Lower data exposure, safer third‑party collaboration, better regulatory alignment.
- SaaS Platforms Serving Regulated Enterprises: A SaaS platform uses Camunda for multi‑tenant orchestration, including regulated customers. Handling customers’ sensitive data slows enterprise sales and increases compliance obligations.
How the connector helps:- Regulated tenants' workflows apply early de‑identification.
- The SaaS platform works primarily with tokens; sensitive data remains governed in Skyflow.
- Customers may use their own Skyflow vaults.
Business impact: Stronger enterprise security story, smoother onboarding, differentiated privacy‑first services.
How to Get Started
If you see similar challenges in your organization, here’s a simple path forward:
- Identify a single high-value, high-sensitivity process For example: customer onboarding, a specific claims journey, or a high-risk internal workflow.
- Map where sensitive data flows today
- Which systems see cleartext?
- Which ones could work with tokens instead?
- Introduce Camunda + Skyflow at key points
- Use Camunda to orchestrate the end-to-end flow.
- Add the Skyflow connector where data enters the process to de-identify, and at a small number of well-justified points to re‑identify.
- Leverage existing documentation and examples:
By combining Camunda’s end-to-end orchestration with Skyflow’s runtime data control and security capabilities, regulated organizations can automate more of their most sensitive workflows without compromising on governance or control. You get the agility to modernize and adopt new technologies, while giving risk and compliance teams a clear, defensible architecture they can trust.
Ready to secure sensitive data across your automated workflows?
Talk to a Skyflow expert about implementing runtime AI data control in your workflows