Client Success: Consumer Products Company Tightens Access Control, Governance to Stay Ahead of Trends

This story is part of our client success series. It showcases Fortune 100 and 500 customers across various industries that turned to Privacera to solve their tough data security, access, and governance challenges. Check out all the stories in this series. 

Staying on top of consumer data to track design trends and product demands is critical to this global sports and fitness consumer products company’s success. It sells its products through owned retail stores, digital platforms, retail accounts, and a mix of independent distributors, licensees, and sales representatives. The company uses this data to adjust its product mix and create new products, styles, and categories.

In a push to increase efficiency, the company set out to centralize onboarding of new data sets and users. Meanwhile, it also needed to maintain compliance with local, national, and global security regulations, and ensure granular control over data access. When initial attempts to manage these challenges failed, Privacera stepped in to help the company get on its way. Read on to learn how this company was able to quickly onboard users, maintain compliance, and centralize governance across its siloed teams and data estate with Privacera.

Business Risks

Given its complex business model, this consumer products company depends on its financial data to manage its supply chain, process external and internal reports, and manage retail operations. The ability to manage inventory and ship products on a timely basis relies on quality data quality. This company also collects and processes personal data for its digital initiatives, including marketing, commerce, products and services, consumer marketing and engagement.

Delays in reporting financial results—such as if a data breach, disruption, or shutdown occurs—could cost the company in lost revenue, profits, and reputational damage. They would also impede the company’s ability to engage in the digital space and negatively impact customer experience.

Business Issues

The amount of data the company manages and processes has accelerated over the last several years. To analyze data from its operations and retail partners, it created a big data environment on AWS with help from cloud services vendors, Snowflake and Databricks. 

For greater efficiency, the company centralized onboarding for team members to a single shared repository in a scalable data lake. As a result, it needed a faster way to onboard new datasets and users, which took weeks to complete and relied heavily on scarce IT resources. 

The company also needed to comply with the mandates of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). As part of this compliance, the company needed granular access control to define who could access which data. 

In its initial attempt to solve these issues, the company chose a product built on an architecture that required extensive data processing to operate. While the product was intended to act as a proxy between analytics services and data storage, it ended up introducing performance and stability issues for internal and third-party users. Meanwhile, governance issues prevented the company from putting more of its data into the cloud, resulting in using only about 15% of its data. 

Seeking a better way forward to dig into the deeper value of its data, the company looked for a new approach.

Solution

Instead of manually digging into its lines of data, the customer chose Privacera to verify user authorization as a plug-in. Databricks continued to handle data processing and storage. This consumer products company now meets its regulatory, contractual, and corporate mandates for governance without sacrificing user experience. 

Business Impact

By adopting the Privacera unified data governance platform, this company achieved business value in essential ways.

Onboarded more data and users faster 

By integrating Privacera into the company’s data pipeline, including the rules automated in the platform, the customer can onboard more data and users quickly while enforcing governance. Prior, the approvals process to set up access rules, new contractors, or analysts could take weeks. With a faster, more streamlined onboarding process, the company could leverage the full potential of its data lake, including 100 percent of its data assets. 

Democratized data access

Leveraging the power of Privacera, the company has been able to further democratize data access. Creating easier data access was critical to accelerate self-service and the work of data scientists around digital transformation.

Empowered teams while maintaining compliance

Compliance challenges can pose hurdles to data analytics initiatives. For this reason, many data scientists often complain about being more of a data plumber than a data scientist. By using Privacera, the company made it simpler to expand access more broadly while enforcing granular access control. Administrators can now:

• Optimize, consolidate, and eliminate redundancy for more than two million policies in Snowflake, improving manageability. 
• Apply rules consistently across Databricks and Snowflake
• Easily enforce the rules for teams inside and outside the company, with full auditability to demonstrate compliance.

Enabled flexibility and efficiency to meet changing needs 

Instead of relying on separate, siloed teams for each of its cloud data services, the company now has a central, API-driven governance layer that unifies and simplifies its entire dynamic data environment. When adding a new data service, the organization can use existing access policies that are already available in Snowflake, without the effort of having to create new ones. 

No matter how unique your data ecosystem, products, and processes are, Privacera can help future-proof your data security, access, and governance for greater scalability, connectivity, and competitive opportunities. 

Learn more in our ebook How to Drive Data Value and Innovation with Unified Data Security Governance. Read the ebook.