The potential for data and analytics to radically change the way businesses operate is arguably limitless. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, “digital transformation” has gone from overused buzzwords to table stakes that can make or break a corporate bottom line. Organizations expect to double the number of artificial intelligence (AI) projects in place within the next year, and over 40% of them plan to actually deploy AI solutions by the end of 2020, according to the Gartner 2020 CIO Agenda Survey.

This market driver is why I am so pleased to announce Okera’s partnership with Domino Data Lab, an enterprise data science management platform. Our combined technologies play a critical role in enabling organizations to derive more value from data, with increased speed to impact, in a safe and compliant way.

At Okera we talk a lot about our vision to enable the last mile of data access. Most data science teams doubt that adding access control to data will increase speed to access and value creation. Using a powerful data science tool like Domino Data Lab is like driving a really powerful race car. (Those who know my aggressive NYC driving skills well can attest to this: speed limits are not my friend!) Today, your data scientists probably feel like they’re constantly hitting red lights trying to get access to data. Combining a tool like Domino with Okera isn’t just like wearing a seatbelt, it’s like transforming the entire road. The assurance of having safety in place actually increases your ability to move quickly and to focus on operating goals. Our combined solution allows you to go full speed ahead with your cutting-edge data science projects, all the while knowing you’re safe, compliant, and well-governed.

Make More Data Available without Compromising Data Privacy

Domino Data Lab improves productivity by providing access to reproducible and easily provisioned computational environments that allow for more effective collaboration between data scientists. It eliminates the tedious tasks of setting up and optimizing Apache Spark clusters, accessing the right version of libraries, creating recurring jobs to keep pace with new data model requirements, and sharing results with others.

Okera administers simple and secure access to data through fine-grained access control policies and dynamic enforcement, eliminating the need to create and maintain multiple copies of a single dataset. This reduces storage costs and time spent creating copies and overseeing data management. It also allows for a single policy to enforce data access across the entire enterprise analytics platform, allowing companies to better understand their policies at scale and ensure the right compliance is enforced with confidence.

As growing concerns about data privacy continue to inspire new regulatory and compliance requirements, organizations need to build systems that check those boxes both now and in the future. Meanwhile, they still need to quickly provision access to their data in an effective and efficient way. Data scientists spend 80% of their time just getting data ready for analysis, rather than actually running and training models. One of the biggest reasons for this slowdown is because of the risk of sensitive data exposure.

Data scientists would ideally like unfettered access to all of the organization’s data in order to build and train their models, but they are often held back by the governance team. Many times, access to critical data is denied altogether, or else they get a copy of the dataset with critical fields redacted or anonymized, sometimes in ways that render the data nearly useless. These copies take a long time to create and are sometimes even out of date by the time data scientists receive them. This limits their productivity and ability to derive business value from data.

Okera & Domino: Increased Efficiency for Data Science

At the core of Okera’s partnership strategy is our alignment to help our customers achieve success using best-of-breed technology solutions. Domino Data Lab is an incredibly powerful platform for enterprise data science, accommodating disparate tools and providing a transparent, scalable and collaborative environment – whether in the cloud or on-premise.

“Harvesting the value of data using next generation augmented analytics requires rapid and secure access to rich data (many disparate large datasets from both internal and external sources). Okera helps liberate sensitive data access at scale across the enterprise, enabling faster insights” said Kalyani Jagannathan – co-founder of Lucid Technologies & Solutions. “We are excited to partner with Okera to help their enterprise customers realize the benefits of this value proposition with their BI, analytics, & data science teams.”

Okera’s partnership with Domino was a natural fit, with a strong joint value proposition of enabling data consumers to use the tools they prefer in an efficient, secure, and highly scalable manner. As more companies are looking to leverage massive amounts of data at scale, the combination of Okera and Domino Data Lab can help accelerate breakthrough research, increase collaboration between data scientists, and rapidly deliver high impact models.

You can read more about the technical aspects of the partnership on the Domino blog.