Microsoft has become strategic to Okera and our customers, and we continue to leverage more of the Microsoft technology stack to meet that demand. Okera has now achieved Microsoft Gold Partner status, which is the highest level of Microsoft’s widely-recognized partnership program. This achievement highlights the synergy between the two companies, where Okera’s data access platform can embrace and extend solutions to our joint customers across their entire product portfolio from Microsoft Data, Dynamics & Power Platforms, to Azure Cloud, to newer technology releases like Purview and Data Catalog.
In addition, I’m excited to announce a milestone that represents a major step toward achieving Okera’s mission to be the leading provider of responsible data access across the enterprise: the Okera secure data access platform is now available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace!
Okera is Microsoft co-sell and transact-ready to best serve our mutual customers with Microsoft. In fact, Okera’s Data Access Platform is available in a variety of instances to meet your needs on Azure Marketplace: a two-week free trial, purchase of a 25 user platform license, or as a private offer transaction for a custom configuration.
Microsoft Azure Marketplace is the premier destination for all your software needs. Search from a rich catalog of more than 17,000 apps and services certified and optimized to run on Azure, with seamless deployment and simplified billing for all Microsoft and third-party solutions. Okera will now reach a broader market with eased procurement and better alignment to enterprise customers with the desire to purchase our software based on existing MS Azure credits or to increase their existing Azure spend to unlock additional incentives.
Okera was designed to bridge the gap between the governance team (who worries about regulatory compliance) and central IT (whose job is to build and maintain the organization’s data platform). Our founders’ deep background in Big Data – having worked on the Impala project at Cloudera, and as an original author of the Apache Parquet project – meant they knew exactly what was missing from the foundational technologies that now make up the modern data platform: security and governance. Okera enables data owners and data stewards to provision access to data from an intuitive, no-code policy builder, thereby relieving central IT from doing the day-to-day work of provisioning access to data.
The Okera data access policy and protection benefits align with a wide variety of technology products across the Microsoft stack. We offers full support for Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen2, Azure Synapse, Azure SQL as a Service, Postgres and MySQL as a service, and delivers consistent and scalable enforcement of fine-grained access policies across all of the leading Azure analytics and machine learning tools like Azure Databricks, Azure Analysis Services, Microsoft PowerBI, and Azure HDInsight. We also have experience enabling and deploying data catalogs and other data governance solutions to enterprise customers at scale.
“Microsoft Azure Data Lakes have become a foundational technology driving digital transformation at enterprises around the world, and Okera provides these organizations with the confidence they need to accelerate their transformations, gain greater business insight, and achieve better business outcomes without sacrificing data privacy, security or governance,” said Nick Halsey, CEO of Okera. “Our availability on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace and status as a Microsoft Gold Partner will make it even easier for enterprises to deploy and manage Okera to ensure secure data access at scale for their Azure data lakes.”
The Okera platform solves one of the biggest challenges with managing a modern, enterprise-scale data platform on Azure: opening up data access for innovation and growth while ensuring full data governance and regulatory compliance. I’m thrilled for Okera to be fully transactable on the Azure Marketplace in order to further ease the acquisition, adoption, and alignment of our platform for the benefit of enterprise cloud customers. Our continued progress to develop closer alignment and broader solutioning across the Microsoft technology stack is not only strategic to Okera, but truly supports the needs of our largest enterprise clients.
To learn more about Okera’s partnership with Microsoft, visit our web page for more information. You can also review our Microsoft Azure Marketplace listing here.
