Okera on AWS Marketplace: Enhanced Data Access for the Modern Analytics Platform

How do you accelerate a revolution? Okera brings enhanced data access to the AWS Marketplace

Okera is proud to be a member of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network, with an Advanced Technology Partner certification and a Data and Analytics Competency. AWS is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully managed services from data centers globally. Recently, Gartner Research positioned AWS in the Leaders quadrant of the new 2020 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Services (CIPS).

Today, I’m excited to announce a new milestone in our partnership with AWS that represents a major step forward in 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 and transactable on the AWS Marketplace!

AWS Marketplace is a curated digital catalog customers can use to find, buy, deploy, and manage third-party software, data, and services they need to build solutions and run their businesses. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—use AWS to lower their IT spend and innovate faster. AWS Marketplace makes those business-to-business purchase decisions and deployments happen in the most efficient manner possible.

I recently read that providing access to data from anywhere is the main reason for cloud adoption. However, the main inhibitor to cloud adoption were concerns associated with data security and protection. This is an incredible opportunity for Okera to further align with AWS to provide enhanced data access solutions to joint customers around the world; together, we can eliminate the biggest inhibitor to cloud adoption!

“Timing is everything in life, and there’s no doubt that cloud computing is the major growth engine propelling the world of SaaS to explosive innovation each day. 2020 will be remembered for many bad things, but it is also the year that the cloud marketplace became a mainstream point of enterprise software acquisition and discovery. We are extremely excited to deepen our partnership with AWS and launch Okera on the AWS Marketplace to ease procurement for joint customers,” said Daniel O’Brien, Director of Channel Sales at Okera.

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.

Combining the computing power of AWS, with the scalability and transparency of Okera for secure data access to scale your data platform, you can reduce friction between data consumers and platform teams. These are some ways we believe Okera can become an integral part of your data platform on AWS:

• If you already have a data lake, Okera can help scale its usage and adoption by opening up access to more data and more users while staying compliant with all regulations that apply to your industry use cases.
• If you’re using AWS Lake Formation to organize and move your data into the cloud, Okera can leverage and extend that investment for more fine-grained access control use cases. You’ll never have to create and maintain multiple copies of a single dataset.
• If you are migrating data to the AWS Cloud with a third-party service provider but have concerns around a possible data breach or compliance issues, Okera can provide a masked environment to the data migration team, ensuring they cannot see the data in motion. All sensitive data will be fully protected, with ongoing access control through Okera to ensure data governance and compliance in the future.

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 platform delivers consistent and scalable enforcement of fine-grained access policies, and seamlessly integrates with AWS services such as AWS IAM, Glue, EMR, Athena, Redshift, and Amazon SageMaker.

AWS Glue: In order to enforce data access policies, Okera maintains a technical metadata catalog, but we recognize that enterprises will often come to us with their own catalogs. We can integrate with Glue to serve as the single source of truth on all technical metadata – and the magic really happens when you add an integration with a business catalog like Collibra or Alation, and are able to enforce access at a technical level using business-level knowledge.

Amazon EMR: With the ability to separate storage from compute and scale each independently, EMR enables the processing of petabyte-scale workloads – at less than half the cost of on-premise solutions – like at one of our F500 customers. Thanks to Okera’s innovative work in performance and scalability, they now have a security and governance solution that scales transparently with their compute.

Amazon SageMaker: The ability to do machine learning (ML) presents as a huge opportunity for data-driven enterprises, but there are two major hurdles to overcome in order to enable it: piecing together all the necessary tools and workflows needed to build, train, and deploy ML models, and providing data scientists with access to the vast quantities of highly enriched data needed to train the model. Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service, solves for the first problem, while Okera provides an access control framework that will allow the organization to open up nearly unfettered access to their data without compromising on the security or potentially creating bias in the model.

The Okera platform solves one of the biggest challenges with managing a modern, enterprise-scale data platform on AWS: 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 AWS Marketplace, to further ease the acquisition, adoption, and alignment of our platform with AWS for the benefit of enterprise cloud customers.

To learn more about Okera on AWS, visit the web page for more information. You can also review our AWS Marketplace listing here.

To hear more about how Okera helped AWS customer Magellan Health migrate to the cloud with secure data access for their analytics stack, download our on-demand webinar.