Summary

Data governance is a practice that requires a high degree of flexibility and collaboration at the organizational and technical levels. The growing prominence of cloud and hybrid environments in data management adds additional stress to an already complex endeavor. Privacera is an enterprise grade solution for cloud and hybrid data governance built on top of the robust and battle tested Apache Ranger project. In this episode Balaji Ganesan shares how his experiences building and maintaining Ranger in previous roles helped him understand the needs of organizations and engineers as they define and evolve their data governance policies and practices.

Announcements

• Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
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• Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Balaji Ganesan about his work at Privacera and his view on the state of data governance, access control, and security in the cloud

Interview

• Introduction
• How did you get involved in the area of data management?
• Can you describe what Privacera is and the story behind it?
• What is your working definition of "data governance" and how does that influence your product focus and priorities?
• What are some of the lessons that you learned from your work on Apache Ranger that helped with your efforts at Privacera?
• How would you characterize your position in the market for data governance/data security tools?
• What are the unique constraints and challenges that come into play when managing data in cloud platforms?
• Can you explain how the Privacera platform is architected?
  • How have the design and goals of the system changed or evolved since you started working on it?
• What is the workflow for an operator integrating Privacera into a data platform?
  • How do you provide feedback to users about the level of coverage for discovered data assets?
• How does Privacera fit into the workflow of the different personas working with data?
  • What are some of the security and privacy controls that Privacera introduces?
• How do you mitigate the potential for anyone to bypass Privacera’s controls by interacting directly with the underlying systems?
• What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Privacera used?
• What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Privacera?
• When is Privacera the wrong choice?
• What do you have planned for the future of Privacera?

Contact Info

• LinkedIn
• @Balaji_Blog on Twitter

Parting Question

• From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Closing Announcements

• Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other show, Podcast.__init__ to learn about the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used.
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Links

• Privacera
• Hadoop
• Hortonworks
• Apache Ranger
• Oracle
• Teradata
• Presto/Trino
• Starburst
  • Podcast Episode
• Ahana
  • Podcast Episode

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA