Protegrity & Starburst
overview
The Protegrity and Starburst integration empowers enterprises to securely query and analyze distributed data across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments by combining Protegrity’s granular, policy-based protection with Starburst’s federated query engine. Persistent encryption, tokenization, and masking are applied directly within Starburst’s SQL-based architecture, ensuring sensitive data is protected in real time during query execution without requiring data movement or replication.
This joint solution accelerates time-to-insight, simplifies compliance in regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, and retail, and delivers a trusted foundation for secure, federated analytics—where distributed data remains protected, accessible, and actionable at scale.
Key Integration Feature
The Protegrity + Starburst integration delivers enterprise-grade data protection across federated queries, enabling secure, compliant analytics on distributed data without sacrificing performance or accessibility.
Features & Capabilities
The Protegrity + Starburst integration delivers enterprise-grade data protection across federated queries, enabling secure, compliant analytics on distributed data without sacrificing performance or accessibility.
01
Granular Data Protection: Security Embedded at the Query Level
Why it Matters
Protecting sensitive data such as PII, PHI, and financial information during federated queries is essential for regulatory compliance and risk mitigation. By embedding security at the query level, organizations can confidently enable analytics across distributed sources without compromising data privacy.
How it Works
Protegrity with Starburst to tokenize account numbers across multiple data lakes and warehouses, ensuring that raw values are never exposed during analysis. This enables analysts to run cross-source aggregate queries securely, supporting both compliance and operational efficiency.
02
Seamless Integration with Starburst Query Engine: Security Without Disruption
Why it Matters
Protegrity’s direct integration with Starburst’s Trino-based architecture ensures that encryption, masking, and tokenization are applied dynamically during query execution. This minimizes performance impact, allowing organizations to maintain interactive analytics experiences even with protected datasets
How it Works
Customers report that interactive query performance is maintained even when working with protected datasets, thanks to Protegrity’s efficient integration. The dynamic application of security policies ensures that data remains secure without slowing down analytics operations.
03
Unified and Secure Data Access: Collaboration Without Risk
Why it Matters
Consistent protection policies across all Starburst-connected sources ensure governed data access for internal teams, subsidiaries, and external partners. This reduces the risk of data breaches and supports compliance with industry regulations.
How it Works
A healthcare provider uses Starburst + Protegrity to securely expose virtualized, de-identified patient records from multiple systems to research partners, supporting HIPAA compliance. This enables collaborative research without compromising patient privacy.
04
AI & Analytics Enablement: Unlock Insights from Distributed Data
Why it Matters
Protegrity-protected data remains usable for advanced analytics, reporting, and AI/ML training, empowering organizations to innovate without regulatory risk. This ensures that sensitive information does not hinder progress in data-driven initiatives.
How it Works
A retail enterprise combines tokenized sales and customer data from multiple clouds through Starburst to build personalization models without violating PCI compliance. This enables targeted marketing and improved customer experiences.
05
Compliance Simplification: Consistent Protection Across Hybrid Environments
Why it Matters
Centralized data protection policies enforced across Starburst’s federated query ecosystem help organizations meet GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and other regulatory mandates. This simplifies compliance management and reduces audit complexity.
How it Works
Enterprises cut audit preparation time by 40% through automated reporting of Protegrity’s field-level protections applied across distributed data sources. This streamlines compliance processes and enhances visibility for regulatory teams.
Architecture &
Sample Data Flow
At the core of Protegrity’s Starburst integration is an architecture designed to deliver persistent, field-level data protection directly within Starburst’s distributed query engine. Sensitive data is safeguarded as it is queried across data lakes, warehouses, cloud storage, or relational databases—and remains protected throughout its lifecycle.
Protegrity integrates seamlessly with Starburst’s Trino-based, massively parallel processing (MPP) query architecture, applying tokenization, encryption, and dynamic masking during query execution. Using Protegrity UDFs embedded in Starburst, protection policies are invoked in real time through the Protegrity Policy Enforcement Platform (PEP) server. This ensures data can be securely queried, federated, and shared across diverse sources—without performance trade-offs or data movement
The data journey
Visualizing the data journey
The data journey
The data journey explained
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01
Data Access
Starburst enables organizations to query data across data lakes, relational databases, NoSQL stores, and cloud platforms without moving it. As queries are executed, Protegrity UDFs ensure sensitive fields are identified for protection.
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02
Data Protection & Transformation
Protegrity applies encryption, tokenization, or masking to sensitive values at runtime. Policies are centrally managed in the Protegrity ESA and enforced by the PEP server, ensuring consistency across hybrid environments.
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03
Data Consumption & Analytics
Business analysts, data engineers, and scientists can query and analyze protected datasets across sources, while unauthorized users see only tokenized or masked data.
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04
AI/ML Enablement
De-identified or tokenized datasets accessed via Starburst can be securely exported into AI/ML pipelines, enabling advanced analytics while meeting GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and CCPA requirements.
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05
Data Sharing & Collaboration
With Protegrity policies applied natively within Starburst queries, organizations can securely expose governed datasets to subsidiaries, partners, and external consumers without risk of sensitive data leakage.
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06
Monitoring & Auditing
Protegrity logs every protect/unprotect event triggered through Starburst. These logs feed into enterprise monitoring systems, enabling compliance teams to audit usage and demonstrate adherence to regulatory frameworks.
DEPLOYMENT
Deployment of Protegrity Data Protection with Starburst offers flexible models to meet enterprise, hybrid, and cloud-native needs. In all cases, sensitive data is persistently protected at query time, ensuring compliance without disrupting Starburst’s federated analytics workflows.
Node-Level Protector (Enterprise / On-Prem Clusters):
Kubernetes Sidecar Protector (EKS / OpenShift / Containerized Deployments):
Cloud Function Protector (Cloud-Native Elasticity):
Across all deployment models, policies are centrally defined and managed in Protegrity’s Enterprise Security Administrator (ESA) and enforced dynamically via Starburst UDFs. The Policy Enforcement Platform (PEP) server synchronizes with ESA to ensure consistent protection logic across nodes, pods, or functions.
Auditing and logging of all protection/unprotection events feed into enterprise monitoring systems and compliance frameworks, while integration with Starburst’s RBAC ensures that only authorized users can access unprotected values.
This flexible architecture allows organizations to deploy Protegrity with Starburst in the way that best fits their environment—whether enterprise data centers, Kubernetes clusters, or public cloud—while always delivering parallelized, scalable, and policy-driven protection for sensitive data.
RESOURCES
Guides and demos to help your team deploy Protegrity with Starburst and run governed federated queries—fast, compliant, and AI-ready.
Solution Brief: Protegrity + Starburst
A concise overview of how Protegrity secures federated queries in Starburst with tokenization, encryption, and masking—enabling compliant analytics and AI across hybrid data sources.
READ BRIEFWatch the Starburst Demo
See real-time, query-time protection in action—how Protegrity policies apply inside Starburst so teams can analyze distributed data without exposing sensitive fields.
VIEW DEMO