Privacera Platform 4.0 is Now Available

Today, we are excited to announce the release of the Privacera Platform version 4.0. With this release, we have made significant improvements to keep pace with increasing enterprise demands and to ensure our customers are comprehensively supported and protected throughout the entire data governance lifecycle–from discovery, to access control, to monitoring and reporting for compliance–for their multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments.

See Privacera Platform 4.0 in action by registering for one of our upcoming webinars highlighting different features and enhancements.

Key Features and Enhancements 

Access Workflows 

Access workflows provide seamless, consistent access controls across enterprises and enable flexible customization to support project- or time-based access. With a single access request, users can request access to data based on their functional roles, data sharing agreements, projects, and engagements, as well as specific sets of data resources (“à la carte”) and associated data classifications or tags. 

Access workflows alleviate the manual, time-consuming process of defining and mapping policies (with prior knowledge of permitted entitlements) for different users. Data owners and administrators no longer have the additional burden of managing entitlements actively, while maintaining deep knowledge of how to efficiently construct and manage entitlements via the access policy infrastructure. 

Instead, access workflows give data consumers and business users a simple, effective method to request access to data and provide data owners or security policy administrators simple approval processes. Because the policy engine intelligently and automatically creates necessary access policy entitlements for users’ access, administrators have a turnkey, single-click approval process, enabling faster access to critical data and streamlined onboarding and provisioning of data access for new users. 

Staying true to our open-source compatibility, Privacera access workflows are built with open APIs and provide native workflow management with open source solutions like Flowable. Customers can leverage API endpoints and extensions to customize data access provisioning and management using enterprise services they might already be using–such as ServiceNow and Zendesk–to provide end-to-end workflow support. 

Enhanced Discovery Rule Engine 

New enhancements to our discovery engine include multi-layer tagging capabilities. This feature enables customers to build more sophisticated access control policies to significantly improve governance and compliance and streamline data tagging to find sensitive data faster and easier. Users can apply tags at multiple levels of data (e.g., columns and tables) and create post-processing rules to apply tags to parent or child objects in the hierarchy. For example, this feature, in conjunction with Privacera Access Manager, can be used to restrict access to entire tables, based on one or more sensitive tags on columns. Tags on columns are provided by an initial set of classification rules and the post-processing rules can generate additional tags for the parent data context based on initial classification. Additionally, users can also create parent-child related access policies based on multiple tags.

Privacera Encryption Gateway

Privacera Encryption Gateway (PEG) extends Apache Ranger’s Key Management Services (KMS) and policy engine to offer precise policy-based encryption and decryption schemes for fine-grained column-level data protection. 

PEG is a robust, scalable API gateway that provides flexible mapping schemes–as well as policy-based encryption and decryption using NIST standards-based encryption algorithms, such as AES-128, AES-256, hashing, and Format Preserving Encryption (FPE)–to customers’ sensitive data and personally identifiable information, without the need for manual processes. 

Users can define how to encrypt specific types of sensitive data, such as credit card numbers or social security numbers, using various schemes. For example, users can encrypt whole elements or selected parts of a field, and PEG will automatically find the scheme mappings and encrypt either entire elements in bulk, or encrypt all the relevant content from sensitive fields, as specified in the schemes selectively. 

Accessible via the Privacera Portal, customers can control access to sensitive data using decryption schemes without worrying about manually updating their software, or managing or maintaining it. Built on Kubernetes, PEG also enables scalability of infrastructures. 

With PEG, Privacera has completely automated the encryption and decryption process for our customers’ data–both data at rest or in motion–so they can accelerate their cloud migration and ensure they are protected across their hybrid architectures. 

Privacera Manager

Privacera 4.0 also includes Privacera Manager, a new management software component that installs, deploys, and manages the Privacera Platform faster and more automated for customers with complex infrastructures. Privacera Manager provides step-by-step instructions for installation, configuration, and upgrades–providing a streamlined experience for even the most complex environments.

Also included are numerous improvements and features, stabilization and bug fixes, as well as expanded platform coverage for Databricks 7.0, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Snowflake, AWS, and Azure.

Want to learn more about Privacera 4.0? Follow our blog, as we will deep dive into these key features, and don’t forget to check out our upcoming events, including our next webinar covering new features and enhancements of Privacera 4.0.