3 Steps to Achieve Seamless Data Governance and Compliance with Privacera and Databricks

Published: November 25, 2020

Enterprise IT and data teams today face a difficult dual mandate: to make data widely available to data scientists and analysts, while ensuring compliance with external privacy regulations, industry standards, and internal data usage best practices.

Together, Privacera and Databricks help your enterprise strike this delicate balance. Our platform integration provides safe and secure access to data and manages your enterprise’s complete data access governance lifecycle across each phase: data discovery, access control management, and reporting.

Step 1: Discover (know where your sensitive data lives)

Effective data discovery is critical for enterprises to protect their customers, prove compliance, and ensure undisrupted operations. Privacera continuously scans data in near-real-time to identify and tag sensitive data, so data teams have complete visibility of data and its usage and proof of compliance when needed. With its seamless integration, Privacera automatically connects to cloud and on-premises storage services and databases that serve as the storage layer for Databricks deployments, including Amazon S3 and Azure Data Lake Storage.

Step 2: Define and Enforce (control who has access to your data)

Data access governance is foundational to democratizing data across enterprises to derive critical insights and drive innovation; however, in order to provide the right users access to the right information they need, fine-grained access controls must be implemented to ensure only authorized users can access sensitive data. Privacera works seamlessly with Databricks to authorize users, then apply fine-grained data access control policies via a single console — enabling more users to access more data they need to derive valuable insights, while ensuring compliance with privacy and industry regulations.

Step 3: Report (monitor and audit your data’s behavior)

Enterprises need visibility of access behaviors in order to identify if sensitive data has been moved and to pinpoint unauthorized access requests. Privacera’s Apache Ranger plug-in audits every access request made at near-real-time, including specific users and environments, and provides contextual information, such as classifications, tenants, security zones, and clusters from which data is accessed. Audit logs can be forwarded to, or transformed for consumption, by downstream systems, SIEMs, and cybersecurity systems for complete visibility and easy proof of compliance with privacy or industry regulations.

Enterprises today must have robust, consistent data governance and compliance solutions to avoid missing out on critical insights that could provide competitive advantages, and — most importantly — to prevent unauthorized users accessing sensitive data, which could result in regulatory noncompliance, financial or reputational harm, or operational disruptions. To avoid these risks, Privacera and Databricks help maximize the value of your data by ensuring consistent governance, security, and compliance across all data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence workloads.

For more in-depth information about how Privacera and Databricks work together, read our whitepaper, or register for our upcoming webinar.