Can we share data between 2 different marketo instances ?

[Akankshap_1304]

We currently have two Marketo instances to support different business areas within our company. Although these businesses are interconnected, we opted for separate instances due to compliance requirements and distinct user groups. One use case we’re exploring is identifying how many users from Instance A also exist in Instance B and have a sort of flag across the record, while ensuring no exchange of PI data and maintaining data security. Is it possible to handle this directly within Marketo, or would a third-party service be needed for data matching? Has anyone ever tried connecting two Marketo instances before?

[uditmathur]

Hi @Akankshap_1304 ,

Your description is confusing. Please clarify, if you are looking to merge 2 separate Marketo instance in one OR are you looking to merge duplicate leads created in your database.

[Akankshap_1304]

We’re not looking to merge the two Marketo instances. Instead, we want to identify duplicates across both instances and flag them within one of them. For example, if Instance A has 10K leads and Instance B has 5K leads, can we determine how many leads from Instance B are also present in Instance A keeping in mind the PII data regulations.

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

It's impossible to do this without passing the Email Address field outside the system to be hashed. Therefore if your legal team considers Email Address to be PII which cannot leave a Marketo instance (other than via emails themselves, of course!) it cannot be done.

If you're OK with passing Email Address to a remote service solely for the purposes of hashing, however, it totally can be done.

You first send the field to a webhook-compatible service that sends back a hash. Write that response hash to a custom field Hashed Email. Then you can call a related service (could be the same code tbh, I'm just describing the different functions) to look up people in the other instance using the hash as the lookup key. In turn, you flag people as "has duplicate in other instance" or whatever else you want.

We've done this a couple of times when people segregate for regulatory or other reasons. The plaintext Email Address only gets sent once person, but again it does have to leave the system. No way around that.