As organizations experience explosions of data, as well as increased demand for analytic insights, data teams must deliver a consistent and unified view of their data to a broad range of technical and non-technical data consumers. They’re also tasked with protecting that data from a growing number of threats. In 2021, data security compromises grew 68%, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center. That number is 23% greater than the previous all-time high!
Data teams, therefore, must dramatically expand access to data for analytics, while maintaining high levels of security and governance, especially for sensitive data, such as Personally Identifiable Information (PII).
On the surface, “open” and “secure” seem to be diametrically opposed. However, Dremio’s Open Data Lakehouse Platform and the Protegrity Data Protection Platform deliver just that: a scalable solution providing broad access to data for a wide range of data consumers while keeping the most sensitive data secure. Read on to learn more about how these two technologies work together.
The Need for the Open Data Lakehouse
As the volume, variety, and velocity of data has grown, many organizations have turned to scalable and flexible storage solutions like cloud-based object storage. In order to move that data into proprietary data warehouses, data teams have constructed brittle, complex ETL pipelines to move the data into proprietary formats, and they then build and maintain multiple copies of the data in the form of BI cubes and extracts in order to meet performance SLAs and deliver analytic insights for specific use cases.
In this scenario, data consumers rely on data engineers and architects to make changes, creating bottlenecks where new data requests oftentimes take weeks or months to fulfill.
The Dremio Open Data Lakehouse platform simplifies data architectures by giving data teams data management and data analytics capabilities directly on the data lake. It consists of two services:
- Dremio Sonar: Dremio Sonar is a SQL query engine providing sub-second response times and queries data directly in data lake storage. Dremio Sonar provides a semantic layer so that a broad range of technical and non-technical users can access data for analytics. It also enables users to connect to and query data in place from other sources, such as relational and NoSQL databases.
- Dremio Arctic: Dremio Arctic is an intelligent metastore for Apache Iceberg, an open table format for cloud-based object storage. Dremio Arctic automatically optimizes data in the lakehouse so data teams don’t have to worry about how the data is structured, and it makes data as easy to work with as code.
The Dremio Open Data Lakehouse is an easy and open platform, built for SQL, eliminating many of the challenges associated with democratizing access to data. It makes data consumers more self-sufficient and it gives data teams the freedom to innovate with data, rather than spending their time on a backlog of data access requests.
Great, We’ve got Open Data! Now Make it Secure.
Business leaders need a unified view of their data in order to make impactful decisions. However, some of that data is sensitive, and due to a number of issues (including cybersecurity threats and rapidly-evolving and ever-expanding data privacy regulations), that data needs to remain secure, whether it is being stored or leveraged for analytics.
The Protegrity Data Protection Platform enables companies to protect sensitive data through a variety of methods, including encryption, tokenization, data masking, and anonymization. Every data protection solution has benefits and tradeoffs, and the Protegrity platform lets customers choose the protection that matches the sensitivity of their data.
Most importantly, the data is protected both at rest and in use, providing freedom to move to analytic targets. Data teams can then enable authorized data consumers with access to sensitive data like PII, financial, and employee data for analytics without creating additional risk.
Leveraging PII in Financial Services with Dremio & Protegrity
Financial Services is an industry that largely managed to avoid the customer revolution of the last decade, but the shift to more digital engagements has revealed gaps in the customer experience. Most financial services firms struggle to deliver a personalized and consistent customer experience across multiple channels. Additionally, financial services firms hold a vast amount of sensitive data, and are 300 times more likely to be the target of cyber attacks, according to Boston Consulting Group.
One North American Fortune 500 financial services company, known for its life insurance and mutual life insurance lines of business, was interested in improving the customer experience with analytics through a number of use cases. First, they wanted to establish a consistent 360-degree view of their policy holders, and deliver insights before policies lapse, which would increase opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling. Second, they wanted to blend data in their data hub with other data sources to reduce the time it takes to close an insurance policy from 30 days to the same day.
The firm chose Dremio for its demonstrated query acceleration performance, and the semantic layer that enabled users to create their own virtual datasets and explore data in a self-service manner. Dremio also allowed them to access a variety of data sources in place, and eliminate data movement and data copies. Utilizing Protegrity’s data protection and integration with Dremio, data teams were able to allow end users to access sensitive customer and financial data so they could make decisions based on a complete 360-view of the customer, and make more accurate and impactful policy decisions.
Get Started with Dremio & Protegrity Today!
The best part of Dremio and Protegrity is how easy it is to get started. Dremio Cloud, the Dremio Open Data Lakehouse delivered as a SaaS platform, features a Forever-Free tier. You can spin up Dremio in your own AWS account and start analyzing data in minutes. All you pay for is AWS infrastructure. Sign up here.
Protegrity is a passionate group of cybersecurity experts working together to develop the widest range of data protection solutions possible to protect the world’s most sensitive data.