Privacera and Databricks SQL: Rapid, Unified Data Analytics with Centralized Data Governance

By: Don Bosco Durai, Akshay Rahatwal, and William Brooks

Recently, our partner Databricks launched their newest service, Databricks SQL, to help data teams consolidate and simplify their data architectures. With Databricks SQL Analytics, data teams can work with BI and SQL workloads on the same multi-cloud lakehouse architecture data scientists have access to in order to perform advanced analytics and machine learning on unstructured and large-scale data.

Coupled with the unified approach Databricks SQL Analytics provides for data analysis, Privacera’s advanced security, privacy, and governance features seamlessly integrate to provide Databricks users with a fully secure solution that controls data access, ensures consistent access policies across all systems and applications, and enables true data transparency across enterprises to maintain compliance with stringent industry and privacy regulations.

Key Benefits for Databricks Users

Fine-grained access control at row- and column- levels with dynamic masking: Privacera empowers administrators to implement access control policies at the column-, row-, and file-levels. This includes the ability to dynamically mask or redact data in columns. It also allows you to filter data in table rows based on user attributes or conditions, enabling Databricks users to share authorized data across multiple users and comply with privacy and security mandates.

Seamless integration: Privacera’s data access governance platform is seamlessly integrated with the Databricks data analytics platform, so customers get the best of both worlds: best in class governance and security from Privacera, coupled with comprehensive capabilities from Databricks SQL Analytics. Additionally, Databricks SQL users will soon have the option of using the service with PrivaceraCloud, enabling a fully-managed SaaS solution configured in minutes without any operational burden.

Single pane of glass across cloud services: Privacera provides a centralized platform to ensure fine-grained access controls are applied across multiple cloud services and administered to data in Databricks SQL from a single location. With this single pane view, Privacera alleviates the need for administrators to navigate multiple, disparate interfaces to govern users’ access. With Privacera’s granular control, more users get rapid access to the data they are authorized to access, and administrators can dynamically build, enforce, and scale policies across all their data sources.

Comprehensive visibility into data access and usage: With Privacera’s rich auditing and reporting capabilities, Databricks SQL users have complete visibility of their sensitive data, including:

• Real-time monitoring and logging
• Detailed audit trails of data usage, including access, policy changes, precise queries executed, and more
• Precise visibility of which data users accessed what data sources and for what purposes, so at any given time, compliance with industry and privacy regulations like GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, LGPD and more can easily be proven

Privacera Support Overview

• Privacera’s PolicySync mechanism centrally defines access policies and executes Grants/Revokes required for access control in Databricks SQL
• Administrators can grant users access to data in Databricks SQL based on their attributes, such as role, organization, location, and others
• Administrators can implement dynamic masking or redact data in columns users are not authorized to access and have the flexibility to apply custom rules to anonymize data in specific fields
• Privacera’s row-level filtering feature narrows the set of table rows displayed to a user, based on defined attribute or condition

Databricks analytics provides data science teams with a unified approach that substantially simplifies data infrastructures and lowers costs for customers–and with the enhanced access controls Privacera provides, data teams don’t have to sacrifice security and governance for high-quality data.

Want to learn more? Watch our Databricks Data and AI Summit video: Accelerating Data Science Initiatives with Privacera and Databricks. 

Request a demo to see how Privacera can secure data in your Databricks SQL environment.