Summary

One of the most challenging aspects of building a data platform has nothing to do with pipelines and transformations. If you are putting your workflows into production, then you need to consider how you are going to implement data security, including access controls and auditing. Different databases and storage systems all have their own method of restricting access, and they are not all compatible with each other. In order to simplify the process of securing your data in the Cloud Manav Mital created Cyral to provide a way of enforcing security as code. In this episode he explains how the system is architected, how it can help you enforce compliance, and what is involved in getting it integrated with your existing systems. This was a good conversation about an aspect of data management that is too often left as an afterthought.

Announcements

• Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
• What are the pieces of advice that you wish you had received early in your career of data engineering? If you hand a book to a new data engineer, what wisdom would you add to it? I’m working with O’Reilly on a project to collect the 97 things that every data engineer should know, and I need your help. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/97things to add your voice and share your hard-earned expertise.
• When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $60 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show!
• Are you bogged down by having to manually manage data access controls, repeatedly move and copy data, and create audit reports to prove compliance? How much time could you save if those tasks were automated across your cloud platforms? Immuta is an automated data governance solution that enables safe and easy data analytics in the cloud. Our comprehensive data-level security, auditing and de-identification features eliminate the need for time-consuming manual processes and our focus on data and compliance team collaboration empowers you to deliver quick and valuable data analytics on the most sensitive data to unlock the full potential of your cloud data platforms. Learn how we streamline and accelerate manual processes to help you derive real results from your data at dataengineeringpodcast.com/immuta.
• Today’s episode of the Data Engineering Podcast is sponsored by Datadog, a SaaS-based monitoring and analytics platform for cloud-scale infrastructure, applications, logs, and more. Datadog uses machine-learning based algorithms to detect errors and anomalies across your entire stack—which reduces the time it takes to detect and address outages and helps promote collaboration between Data Engineering, Operations, and the rest of the company. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datadog today to start your free 14 day trial. If you start a trial and install Datadog’s agent, Datadog will send you a free T-shirt.
• You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data platforms. For more opportunities to stay up to date, gain new skills, and learn from your peers there are a growing number of virtual events that you can attend from the comfort and safety of your home. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to check out the upcoming events being offered by our partners and get registered today!
• Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Manav Mital about the challenges involved in securing your data and the work that he is doing at Cyral to help address those problems.

Interview

• Introduction
• How did you get involved in the area of data management?
• What is Cyral and what motivated you to build a business focused on addressing data security in the cloud?
• Can you start by giving an overview of some of the common security issues that occur when working with data?
  • What new security challenges are introduced by building data platforms in public cloud environments?
• What are the organizational roles that are typically responsible for managing security and access control to data sources and repositories?
  • What are the tensions, technical or organizational, that lead to a problematic or incomplete security posture?
• What are the differences in security requirements and implementation complexity between software applications and data systems?
• What are the data systems that Cyral integrates with?
  • How did you determine what platforms to prioritize?
• How does Cyral integrate into the toolchains used to deploy, maintain, and upgrade an organization’s data infrastructure?
• How does the Cyral platform address security and access control of data across an organization’s infrastructure?
• How are schema changes handled when using Cyral to enforce access control to PII or other attributes?
• How does Cyral help with reducing sprawl of data across unmonitored systems?
• What are some of the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you learned while building Cyral?
• When is Cyral the wrong choice?
• What do you have planned for the future of the Cyral platform?

Contact Info

• LinkedIn
• @manavrm on Twitter

Parting Question

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

Links

• Cyral
• Snowflake
  • Podcast Episode
• BigQuery
• Object Storage
• MongoDB

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