Scaling Data Governance and Security: A Fintech Success Story with Privacera

Overview

A leading fintech company with a robust presence across the globe in multiple financial services sectors, including consumer finance, small business, personal finance, and money movement, faced the challenge of managing and governing access to vast amounts of data. Their data is stored in massive Amazon Redshift clusters. Each allocated to specific lines of business (LOBs). Each cluster, catering to a different business segment, is  utilized by hundreds of analysts to generate reports and insights. These insights empowers leadership to make data-driven decisions that significantly impact their company’s performance and overall user satisfaction.

Given the scale and complexity of their operations, managing data security, access governance, and compliance while enabling seamless data access for their analysts became a critical priority.

Challenge

The fintech firm operates at a staggering scale:

• Thousands of tables are accessed daily across multiple Redshift clusters.
• More than 400-500 active users, including analysts from various LOBs, regularly consume this data to generate reports, run analytics, and provide aggregated insights.
• The data, critical to each LOB, originates from diverse customer applications. These applications generate enormous amounts of information, which is continuously ingested into Redshift.

The firm faced a significant and multi-dimensional challenge:

1. Data Governance: Ensuring that data from different business lines, such as personal finance, small business, and tax, was governed correctly based on user roles and regulatory requirements.
2. Security & Compliance: Protecting sensitive information in a highly regulated industry, ensuring that only authorized users had access to specific datasets.
3. Scalability: As the company scaled, the volume of data across thousands of tables increased, making manual governance and access control impractical and error-prone.
4. Efficient Reporting: Analysts require quick and secure access to data to generate real-time insights for decision-making without delays caused by compliance bottlenecks or security risks.

Solution

The fintech company turned to Privacera to streamline and secure their data and access governance process, enhancing both compliance and business outcomes. By implementing Privacera’s Data Security  Platform, the firm was able to:

1. Automate Access Controls: Privacera enables fine-grained access controls over the company’s Redshift clusters, ensuring that only authorized users can access specific datasets based on their role and responsibilities within the organization. This eliminates the need for manual governance processes, which are error-prone and hard to scale.
2. Centralized Governance for Distributed Clusters: Each business line’s Redshift cluster—whether it was for the consumer group, small business, personal finance, or tax—is governed centrally through Privacera. This approach ensures that data security policies are consistently applied across the entire organization, allowing for seamless auditing and compliance.
3. Comprehensive Data Visibility: Privacera’s platform provides the company’s data governance teams with real-time visibility into who accessed which data and when, ensuring transparency and easy reporting for regulatory purposes. This transparency also helps leadership gain confidence that their critical business data is secure.
4. Scalable Solution for Petabyte-scale Data: Privacera’s architecture allows the company to manage and govern access to petabytes of data without compromising performance. The platform was designed to scale, ensuring that as the company grew, their data governance solution can effortlessly handle increased demand.
5. Enhanced Business Outcomes: By securing and governing access to sensitive data across thousands of tables and hundreds of users, Privacera enables analysts to quickly generate reports and insights. This is leading to improved decision-making across all lines of business, driving better customer experiences and financial outcomes. The firm’s leadership team relies on these real-time insights to make strategic business decisions that directly impact growth.

Results

Since implementing Privacera’s Data Security and Governance platform, the fintech firm has achieved:

• Improved Data Security: Fine-grained access controls and automated governance policies have dramatically reduced the risk of unauthorized data access across their Redshift clusters.
• Scalability: The company can now effortlessly manage data governance across petabytes of data, with no performance issues as their business continues to scale.
• Regulatory Compliance: Privacera’s platform has simplified regulatory reporting, providing detailed visibility into data access patterns and ensuring compliance with industry regulations.
• Faster Decision-Making: Analysts can now access the data they need securely and quickly, enabling leadership to make data-driven decisions in real time.

Conclusion

By partnering with Privacera, this leading fintech firm has been able to streamline and scale its data security and governance operations, empowering their analysts to derive insights that drive better business outcomes. Privacera’s solution not only improved data security but also delivered exceptional value by enabling data-driven decision-making across the company’s leadership, ultimately resulting in enhanced customer experiences and increased business growth.

For organizations looking to efficiently manage data security and governance at scale, especially in highly regulated industries like finance, Privacera’s platform offers a comprehensive solution that balances security with business agility.