In today's digital landscape, data has become the life and blood for enterprises, consumers and customers. With the rise of Big Data, companies have access to large amount of information for data both within the enterprise and also to data about their market and competitors. Almost every decision making is now data driven. And this requires people from each department/business-line of the enterprise to have access to data in some form or the other. Traditionally this data has been locked away in silos, only accessible to a privileged section of people within the organization. This limited the employees to collaborate and make informed decisions, leading to missed opportunities and lost revenue.
This brings about the need for Data Democratization. Data democratization is increasingly becoming a critical aspect of modern data strategies. At it’s core, it can be described as the process of making data more accessible and understandable to a wider range of people within an organization. Data democratization is the ongoing process of enabling everybody in an organization, to work with data comfortably, to feel confident talking about it, and, as a result, make data-informed decisions and build customer experiences powered by data.
However, this has a flip side as it also increases the risk of privacy violations and data leaks. Therefore, proper data governance and security measures should be in place when implementing data democratization. Let’s see how Databricks Unity Catalog enables this in the Databricks Platform.
Unity Catalog: Centralized and Effective Data Governance
Databricks Unity Catalog plays a crucial role in supporting data democratization by providing a unified governance layer for data and AI within the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. Here’s how unity catalog enables this:
Single Permission Model: Simplified access management with a unified interface to define access policies on data and AI assets. Singular framework for organizations to manage data access, security policies, and compliance in one place.
Unified Data Management: Simplified management and governance of diverse structured and unstructured data, machine learning models, notebooks, dashboards, and files on any cloud or platform. Consolidate and query data from various platforms.
Data Discovery and Collaboration: Enables data scientists, analysts, and engineers to securely discover, access, and collaborate on trusted data and AI assets. This boosts productivity and unlocks the full potential of the lakehouse architecture.
AI-Powered Monitoring and Observability: Unity Catalog harnesses the power of AI to automate monitoring, diagnose errors, and uphold data and ML model quality. It provides comprehensive observability into your data and AI with operational intelligence.
Open Data Sharing: Unity Catalog supports open source Delta Sharing, which allows easy sharing of data and AI assets across clouds, regions, and platforms.
By simplifying data discovery, Unity Catalog enables a wider range of users to leverage data for insights and innovation without compromising on governance and security. Unity Catalog works with your existing data catalogs, data storage systems and governance solutions so you can leverage your existing investments and build a future-proof governance model without expensive migration costs.
For more details:
https://www.databricks.com/product/unity-catalog
https://www.databricks.com/blog/announcing-general-availability-unity-catalog-volumes
https://docs.databricks.com/en/data-governance/unity-catalog/best-practices.html
https://docs.databricks.com/en/data-sharing/index.html