Behind the Investment: Privacera – The Future of Integration-First Data Governance

Today, more data is created than any other time in human history – recent studies show that over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created each day and that this pace is only continuing to accelerate. As enterprises become more data-driven (‘data-first’) and employ a more hybrid cloud approach whereby more data is hosted via public cloud providers (such as AWS, Azure, GCP) alongside their own servers, these companies are faced with the major challenge of securely ingesting, storing, parsing (‘cataloging’), and governing access to this data at an organizational level; with great power comes great responsibility. Furthermore, evolving governmental regulations such as CCPA, GDPR, LGPD and HIPPA, outline specific legal requirements for data governance and security, ultimately leaving enterprises with a fervent need for solutions to fill the void, as data governance was historically a manual and arduous process. That’s where Privacera comes in.

At a high level, Privacera’s vision is to help enterprises leverage data efficiently and responsibly. From a more technical perspective, Privacera provides a centralized platform built natively on top of Apache Ranger – a framework created by Privacera CEO Balaji Ganesan and CTO Don Bosco Durai. This enables, monitors, and manages comprehensive data security within Hadoop and across multiple cloud services – for highly scalable data access and associated policy management via an ‘out-of-the-box, integration-first’ approach.

Major integrations include the leading public cloud vendors mentioned above, as well as leading cataloging tools such as Alation, Collibra, and leading data warehousing and analytics tools Databricks, Dremio and Snowflake. This integration-first approach is critical to Privacera’s commercial success, which I’ll drill into below, as it enables any business to be a potential customer of Privacera regardless of where they are on their journey to the cloud.

Founded in 2016, Privacera has already seen tremendous adoption not only in the G2000 and within regulated industries such as finance, insurance and healthcare, but has also seen major success across technology, retail, food & beverage, telecom, entertainment, and manufacturing & engineering, driving 128% contracted ARR growth and 189% growth in customer base.

• “Privacera’s access control and security is critical to protect from different data leaks. Its fine-grained authorization is critical.” – Sr. Principal Software Architect, Fortune 500 Telecom
• “To me, I think Privacera is the best in what they do, in that aspect, having easy access and better data from better integrations.” – VP of Technology, Fortune 500 Bank
• “Having strong privacy delivered by Privacera is definitely a must.” – Global Director of Big Data, Cloud, and AI, Technology Customer

As for the genesis of the partnership between Insight & Privacera, our first conversation with CEO Balaji Ganesan, was back in early 2019, when the company was less than 20 employees. At that time, it was apparent that Balaji and his team were best-in-class technologists and their vision for Privacera would solve real pain points in the market. Since that time, we were excited to build a relationship with Privacera and prove our value as a potential ScaleUp partner over the coming years.

Come Winter 2020, Privacera had rapidly commercialized their technology and were quickly scaling the team to 130+ employees, putting them in the sweet spot for us to partner with them to further accelerate their growth and take the business to the next level! Both parties quickly engaged. Now, post-investment we remain eager to double down on Privacera’s rapid commercialization and help them shape the future of secure data access and holistic data governance across the hybrid cloud.

To learn more: Watch this video from Praveen Akkiraju on what key aspects of Privacera make them an ideal ScaleUp company.

Julian Marcu Vice President More By The Author