PrivaceraCloud is Our Future

By Balaji Ganesan, CEO of Privacera

I am extremely excited and proud to announce that PrivaceraCloud is now generally available. PrivaceraCloud is much more than a product release; it represents the future of Privacera. It is a major milestone in our journey that started with XA Secure, which found a home at Hortonworks and transformed itself into Apache Ranger. Since then, Ranger has been used by thousands of companies around the world to secure their on-premises Hadoop data lakes.

When Don Bosco and I formed Privacera to solve the bigger problem of data security and governance across cloud services, we started with the solid foundation of Ranger and built on top of it. We have come a long way since 2016, and now Privacera Platform is in use at some of the largest companies in the world, including leading consumer products, financial services, and insurance companies. The majority of our customers are in the midst of transforming themselves into data-driven organizations, with the objective of improving competitive position within their respective industries by finding insights from data. The cloud provides a perfect analytic platform by removing the operational burden for businesses to provision hardware, software, and maintain their own data centers. By migrating their data and analytical workloads to the cloud, companies can bring their applications online faster. Moving to the cloud helps companies modernize their infrastructure. They can dynamically adjust the computing resources devoted to applications based on the demand these applications experience at any given time. This means that businesses can add or remove storage and compute resources on-demand and independently.

Despite these benefits, a majority of our customers, and the market in general, have implemented a hybrid architecture, as concerns about data security and control linger. These concerns have been particularly strong among banks, insurance firms, and companies in regulated industries. However, when we talk to our customers, we can see early signs of the tide turning. In fact, the majority of forward-thinking companies in a number of industries will develop the confidence to run their IT infrastructure and analytical platforms exclusively in the cloud. The economics of cloud are too attractive, and the risks of not migrating are too high for companies to remain tethered to their on-premises IT infrastructure.

According to research by McKinsey & Company, companies that develop world-class operations in the cloud can reduce IT complexity by 75%, enhance their efficiency by up to 20% within 12 to 18 months of implementation, and reduce overall cost by 5% to 10% year-over-year. We think companies can expect to make these gains because the public cloud is driving a lot of innovation in IT. Nowhere is this more evident than in the area of analytics and AI. AWS, Azure, and GCP now collectively offer more than 100 analytics and machine learning services.

A combination of competitive advantage and technological innovation will motivate IT departments to become cloud-only organizations. Privacera’s mission is to help companies make this transition easier, so they can compress the time-to-value from their data.

PrivaceraCloud is the first step in the direction to offer a truly SaaS-based data security and governance platform. PrivaceraCloud accelerates a company’s journey to the cloud through a managed service that can be deployed in seconds. With PrivaceraCloud, there is no need to install the platform using Docker or Kubernetes, configure the services, scale the portal software, or manage operation and uptime of the environment. PrivaceraCloud provides immediate value by lowering the cost and management burden of the underlying infrastructure by empowering IT teams to focus on value-added tasks.

Architected for cloud, we have expanded PrivaceraCloud’s coverage to include major cloud-native services and data warehouses, including Databricks, EMR (Hive & Presto), Starburst, Snowflake, Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS), Azure Synapse, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, Amazon S3, and Postgres.

We cannot fulfill the data governance requirements of our customers unless we become a cloud-first company ourselves. Privacera’s goal of becoming a cloud-first company requires us to make strategic investments in PrivaceraCloud. We plan to deliver future enhancements and functionality to our customers, first, through PrivaceraCloud. We believe enterprises that plan to run their analytical workloads exclusively in the cloud need a data governance platform that is built as a cloud service. Whenever our customers decide to make that transition, we will be there to support their needs.

I invite enterprises to try PrivaceraCloud free for 30 days and look forward to your feedback.