Privacera + Databricks Unity Catalog: A Secure Combination for Open Data Sharing

Recently, our partner Databricks announced the launch of Unity Catalog at this year’s Data and AI Summit. As data catalogs have become critical to effective, modern-day data management, Privacera is proud to support Databricks in their effort to simplify enterprises’ processes of securing and governing data and AI assets across multiple cloud services. 

What is a Data Catalog? 

A data catalog is, on the simplest level, an organized inventory of data across enterprises. It consists of metadata and other tools that help data users and analysts easily find the data they need to do their jobs efficiently and effectively. Along with helping data users easily find data for analysis, data catalogs can also serve as useful tools to maintain security and governance.

However, data catalogs have traditionally been confined within the walls of the enterprise itself, often causing data silos and restricting the full power of how enterprises can use data collaboratively. Since this is a complex challenge to be solved by one vendor alone, Privacera and other industry leaders within Databricks’ partner ecosystem, are teaming up to address it collaboratively. 

Unity Catalog provides a centralized data catalog framework to consolidate metadata and governance requirements in one location, extended and enriched by partners with additional metadata or, in Privacera’s case, by leveraging our advanced sensitive data discovery and classification capabilities, fine-grained access control, and dynamic masking/encryption consistently across cloud services like Databricks. 

Unity Catalog and Privacera – A Secure Combination

Privacera’s centralized data access governance platform adds significant value to Unity Catalog, with a highly-scalable and high-performance sensitive data discovery engine that can help populate Unity Catalog’s metadata collection. Then, classifications and tags that the Privacera Platform automatically generates from scanning data in cloud object stores and data warehouses are fed into Unity Catalog. These classifications are further enhanced with additional data attributes, including statistics, schemas, data samples, ownership, and descriptions to provide a comprehensive view of data across all cloud services and applications.

As Unity Catalog is populated, it can serve Privacera’s Access Control component with additional metadata, and tags can be used to build and enforce richer access control policies. These tag-based policies can also be merged with existing policies in users’ environments and applied consistently by using the Delta Sharing protocol.

Privacera’s encryption capabilities further enhance Unity Catalog by ensuring sensitive data is compliant with privacy and industry regulations. Privacera’s policy-based encryption inherits compliance and governance requirements directly from the Unity Catalog and applies it consistently across all cloud services and tools, providing enterprises peace of mind that data is secure and used appropriately within the parameters of compliance regulations. 

Secure Data Sharing Use Case with Privacera + Unity Catalog + Delta Sharing 

In a healthcare scenario, a provider might share data with an insurance company. This data is highly sensitive, because it is governed by multiple compliance policies, including HIPAA. Privacera integrates with both Unity Catalog and Delta Sharing to secure this process, enabling live, secure data sharing between the provider and the insurance company, without duplication, and provides a seamless integration with built-in security and governance. Privacera can scan these datasets and automatically classify PHI and PII fields. With enriched metadata from Unity Catalog, sensitive data can be classified and tagged by Privacera, then masked and encrypted with granular access controls applied consistently with Delta Sharing, so data can be shared externally between organizations, ensuring only authorized users can access the data to which they have permission.

Learn more
To learn more about Privacera and how we work together with Databricks to help drive open, secure data sharing, read our blog on Delta Sharing, and stay tuned for more information as we continue to work closely with Databricks to extend our Unity Catalog integration.