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Bringing Governance and Security to Democratized Data: Why We’re Partnering with Privacera

The volume of data that companies collect and analyze is ballooning–a trend with no end in sight. The more data that companies manage, the more they can analyze it to better inform business decisions and deliver personalized product value to their end customers. Along with this data tsunami, companies are being pressured to not only use this data optimally, but to also comply with a growing number of privacy regulations that govern the usage of this data. 

That’s why we’re excited to partner with Privacera and participate in their $50 million Series B financing. The company’s data governance platform helps enterprises provide data access to those users that need it while ensuring access is consistent and secure across all cloud and on-premise platforms. Founded by the creators of Apache Ranger, Privacera extends the open-source project into the modern cloud ecosystem for enterprises.

Here’s more on why we’re excited to back Privacera:

Enabling secure data access for all employees and teams

The amount of data being created globally is exploding with the volume expected to grow from 45 zettabytes in 2019 to 175 zettabytes by 2025. Increasingly, this takes the form of unstructured data stored across multiple platforms in the cloud, as well as in legacy on-premise systems. With so much data available for companies to leverage and analyze, companies are racing to figure out how to make the most of it. 

To efficiently and safely use all this data, enterprises must find a way to manage the access to this data in a secure and compliant way. Previously, access was rigidly controlled through centralized IT teams that fielded queries from across an organization. Now, many companies are giving employees direct access to huge caches of data, enabling them to work faster and be agile while also saving IT resources. While democratizing data access makes it more usable, it also creates challenges around governance, security and compliance.That’s why enterprises have started turning to platforms like Privacera, which enable them to centralize data access control regardless of where it lives. With Privacera, IT operations and analytic teams have the data visibility and accessibility they need, while being able to easily manage privacy and compliance controls. 

Data management and security have always been a priority for companies, but ensuring data compliance and security has become an even greater area of focus in the context of recent regulations such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and GDPR, as well as the vulnerabilities that come with having a fully remote workforce amid the pandemic. According to Gartner’s 5th annual CDO survey, data governance is a top-3 priority for most enterprises.

A single platform for managing data, privacy and compliance

Privacera helps enterprises keep data easily accessible to all users while taking control from a privacy and compliance standpoint. The platform provides companies with visibility into sensitive data discovery and classification, and provides centralized access management and anonymization, regardless of whether the data lives in the cloud or in an on-premise data center. 

Built on a leading open-source data governance and security framework, Privacera expands the functionality of these tools for enterprises with multi-cloud and hybrid data environments. At the same time, it strengthens privacy controls and provides a unified view for data management.

Privacera allows companies to scan and tag sensitive information to form a data catalog, define and enforce detailed data management policies and monitor data access patterns, regardless of the source. Whether it’s uncovering data at risk of not complying with regulations, enforcing nuanced policies about who has permission to access which datasets or setting detailed rules for encrypting sensitive information, Privacera solves a number of critical problems for businesses increasingly relying on data.

In speaking with Privacera customers, we heard incredibly strong feedback about the product and its capabilities. The consensus was that Privacera was the most scalable and robust solution on the market, and that the deployment and automation of policies was seamless.

Building on the success of leading open-source frameworks

Privacera’s founders, CEO Balaji Ganesan and CTO Don Bosco Durai, are also the creators of Apache Ranger and Apache Atlas, which is deployed in over 500 enterprises. Balaji’s and Don’s combined expertise and passion makes them the perfect team to take these successful open-source projects to the next level. Balaji and Don are also experienced entrepreneurs in the data and security space, having founded XA Secure, which was acquired by Hortonworks in 2014. 

Privacera’s success to-date was recently highlighted in the 3rd annual Enterprise Tech 30 (ET30) list, where the company ranked #2 in the early stage category. As Privacera continues to grow in popularity, the latest round of funding will help the company expand its sales and marketing teams, and will enable it to bolster its SaaS data governance and security product features to seamlessly support ease of data access without compromising compliance. 

Privacera is the latest addition to Sapphire’s large number of data-focused investments which includes current investments like Dremio, ThoughtSpot, DataRobot, InfluxData, Alation, Matillion and SumoLogic as well as past investments like Alteryx, Looker (Google), Segment (Twilio) and MySQL (Oracle).

 

Legal disclaimer

Disclaimer: Nothing presented within this article is intended to constitute investment advice, and under no circumstances should any information provided herein be used or considered as an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy an interest in any investment fund managed by Sapphire Ventures (“Sapphire”). Information provided reflects Sapphires’ views as of a time, whereby such views are subject to change at any point and Sapphire shall not be obligated to provide notice of any change. Companies mentioned in this article are a representative sample of portfolio companies in which Sapphire has invested in which the author believes such companies fit the objective criteria stated in commentary, which do not reflect all investments made by Sapphire. A complete alphabetical list of Sapphire’s investments made by its direct growth and sports investing strategies is available here. No assumptions should be made that investments listed above were or will be profitable. Due to various risks and uncertainties, actual events, results or the actual experience may differ materially from those reflected or contemplated in these statements. Nothing contained in this article may be relied upon as a guarantee or assurance as to the future success of any particular company. Past performance is not indicative of future results.