(upbeat techno music) >> LISA MARTIN: Welcome to today's session of theCubes presentation of the AWS startup showcase, new breakthroughs in DevOps, data analytics, and cloud management tools. This segment features Privacera, and we're going to be talking about data and analytics. I'm Lisa Martin, and today we're joined by Balaji Ganesan the Co-Founder and CEO Privacera. Balaji is going to be talking about accelerating cloud migration and secure self-service analytics with Privacera. Balaji, great to see you again. >> BALAJI GANESAN: Great see you Lisa, and thank you for having me again. >> LISA MARTIN: Our pleasure. Talk to me a little bit about Privacera and specifically what you guys are focused on. >> Yeah, absolutely. Let me start off talking about the problem we are trying to solve. Privacera today is at the intersection of data, data analytics and data governance. And we have seen in the news every time is the use of data in the organizations is increasing and more organizations are becoming data driven. And to solve customer, understand customer more, or to solve supply chain, the use of data is prevalent. And with that, what we are seeing is true data democratization that is happening now in the cloud, where more and more enterprise users are looking for access to the data. And if you look at the world of data teams and IT teams. On one hand, business users are looking for more access to the data, more use cases, more tools, and faster access to the data to drive business decisions, and that's the world they are living in. And every business, every industry is going towards that part. But on the other hand, governance and especially security privacy within has become table stakes, right. Where it's become a board level topic and on especially topics around, how do you get visibility on what data you have? Do you know where your sensitive data is? And making sure you're taking care of all the protections and stipulations around that. But you also have mandates around making sure that people have access to the data only for that purpose, and right people having access to the right data, only the right data and nothing more, is a mandate that is becoming more and more prevalent. Again, driven through privacy regulations and legal mandate. But operationalizing that in the context of data and data democratization is incredibly hard, because these teams are dealing with variety of databases and tools and each have its own way of doing controls. And so if they have a mandate of making sure right people have access to the right data, it's incredibly hard to operationalize that, it's incredibly complex doing manually. And that's the dual mandate we live in today is, on one hand, more users are looking for access to the data, On the other hand, you know, you need to have governance, you need to have guard rails, and how do you balance that out? And for us, it's not a zero sum game and we believe we can balance both, and that's essentially where Privacera comes in, where we are providing a horizontals single pane of glass which helps enterprises to do two major things, right. One is them get visibility, accurately, on what data they have, what is sensitive data and what is not at a pretty fine grain level. And we can leverage that information to build policies and rules in a more unified manner, or on who can access what data, and enforce them across any kind of database or application. And what it helps enterprises to do that is they can deal with this unified layer to get visibility, this deal with this unified layer to manage policies in one place, and they can make sure that these policies are enforced across anywhere that users are accessing data. So in effect, the net result is users can use any tool, any applications to access data. On the other hand, you are governing that, you're governing the access and making sure that people have only access to the data they are supposed to and nothing more. And that is where we are helping those dual mandate coming. >> LISA MARTIN: Talk to me about the timing. Are we at an inflection point? You talked about the data sharing, governance security being a board level conversation, you and I have talked about that before, but also the balancing the need to be able to give the right people access to only the data that they need. Are we at an inflection point in time for Privacera to be able to solve this problem for companies in lots of industries? >> Absolutely. So, if you're taking step back at a macro level, there are a couple of things happening at the macro level, right. Which digitization has become made sure that there's more data than ever than enterprises are sitting in. And the fact that they are now also migrating to the cloud and to the public cloud, which is giving rise to newer architecture, newer way of doing things. And traditionally it used to be the case that you have to make copies of data, and to make it available for different business groups. But now you are at that point where cloud, you definitely don't have to do that, you can make data available in the cloud and run a service on top of it to make data available. And in fact, I'm going to use a use case of Sun Life that are on that that part of it, where Sun Life is a valued customer of us, it's an insurance company and they are in that midst of their journey as well, where they're migrating from on-premise and to cloud, and in this case being AWS. And cloud gives them a lot of flexibility, agility for them to go and accelerate those data initiatives. So at a macro level like Sun Life, digitization has become prominent, and like Sun Life, many other companies are accelerating their cloud migration. But what Sun Life has is, they have to have a lot of mandates built in, in terms of governance and security, being an insurance industry, being dealing with a lot of sensitive data, both which are mandate to have a lot of regulations around it. And Sun Life is global, they are in Canada, they are in US, you have to make sure those are mandates are met then. For the teams which are doing that it's hard to meet that mandate. And how do you balance governance and accelerate cloud migration and use of data? And that's essentially where we are at that inflection point today, where these mandates are coming at cross hairs to each other, right. But companies cannot ignore governance and accelerate cloud migration. On the other hand, they can't just make the data siloed so much that they ignore the use of data part of it. So we are at this interesting inflection point where these drivers are coming in and it crosses each other and it's intersecting at these data teams. We're trying to deal with this dual mandates at the end of the day. And this is exactly what Sun Life was facing, and where they started looking at a solution like Privacera and where we are able to quickly, on the AWS environment, build that unifier layer of access governance, where they can go and manage policies in one place and migrate policies which have been built in the on-premise world to the cloud. And what did help them do that is they were able to build in governance from day one and they were able to quickly get to a faster time to value. It would have taken them in months or maybe a year to get to that stage. They were able to do that in weeks with our tool. And so what we are seeing at this inflection point now is, there are these trends coming at potentially a friction with each other, but it's not a zero sum game, right. It should not be treated as a zero sum game. You can have governance and use of data, and that's essentially where Privacera's mission is. >> LISA MARTIN: Let's talk about digital transformation. You should that great example of Sun Life and the really accelerated time to value that they're getting with Privacera. But if we think about some of the business drivers for data management, modernization, how have they changed and accelerated particularly in the last 18 months? What are some of the business drivers for data management modernization that you see emerging? >> BALAJI GANESAN: Absolutely, Yeah. So, I think what we are seeing is businesses are more hungry for data as, than ever before, and they are not willing to wait for IT teams to complete an infrastructure and a project for many, many years to get access to the data. And cloud makes it possible for them to go and even build tools like Snowflake, for example, where they can quickly go and use that in a SaaS environment and solution without having a dependency, a huge dependency on IT teams. So the world of IT is changing, where business teams can go and gain access to their more modern tools faster than ever before. Infrastructure doesn't have to be built for many, many years before you can realize some of the business initiatives. So cloud is really transforming the agility, the time to value part of it, so what we are seeing that part. From a data management point of view, governance in general, which includes quality, metadata, includes security, privacy, all of this are becoming very, very serious topics, and it's not like they haven't existed before, but given the growth of data you no longer can grow unimpeded, without having those foundational layer of governance. You cannot grow without having your metadata strategy aligned, right. You cannot grow without good quality measures in (indistinct). And security privacy is in that bucket. It used to be the case before that people will do projects and then worry about security. In 2021 that's no longer the case, right. Companies are looking at building these governance mandates upfront, they are thinking about building access governance upfront, building security upfront. Because if you don't do that, if you go and scale in an environment with all those layers, you end up exposing that for risk. But you also have a friction, a friction of not being onboarding more data, because that needs to be compliant as well. So more organizations, more proactive organizations are realizing that they need to be more holistic. They need to put in more governance roadmap very early on in their journey. And that's what Sun Life did, they were very proactive as part of the cloud migration journey, to think about these things upfront and not think of them as an after fact. After fact are something that comes later, most proactive organizations are doing both. >> LISA MARTIN: The need for being able to build things in that print, I'm thinking automation. Talk to me about some of the risks that an enterprise is going to run into if security isn't automated, governance and strategies aren't automated or embedded, as you said upfront. >> BALAJI GANESAN: Yep. I think the risk comes up when is in twofold. One is, many companies have started doing manually and manual work and it becomes fairly a complex initiative. And we were talking to one customer where they have started with snowflake, but quickly they ended up having about 2 million policies in snowflake alone, right, it's not they had some more of the other parts. And 2 million policies across various business groups, but if you need to prove right people have access to the right data, it's incredibly hard when you've grown so much inorganically in many, many ways as part of it. And most organizations have realized that that is going to be untenable, right. And because again, going back, they have this dual mandate that they need to meet. So the risks are for companies which don't do it upfront is it becomes a blocker. At some point, governance becomes a blocker of putting even more data in, or more users in because you have to now go and clean up and make sure that again, right people have access to the right data, set those infrastructure in. And that sets back the company away a bit again as part of it. So, we have seen governance becoming a blocker in data initiatives, and we believe that by enabling this upfront, it can be a true enabler, it can be an accelerant in case. And more proactive organizations like Sun Life have realized that part of doing it early enough, setting those foundations early enough helps them being more agile and helps them meet those business objectives faster. >> LISA MARTIN: I can also imagine too, from a liability perspective, the lack of visibility into where sensitive data is stored, how it's used, who can use it, it is a huge risk for any type of organization, right? >> BALAJI GANESAN: Any type of organization. And with what we have seen with privacy regulations now is, privacy impacts any type of organizations which have customer data. And there's more onus now than ever before to go and make sure that you have clear visibility on what is sensitive data, what is personal information and clear protections around that, and make sure it's used for those right purposes. And it has become real, it's become real in every industry. So while it used to be that healthcare industries has certain regulations, or financial industry, would you count those as part of a regulated industries? What privacy regulations have done is now impacting consumer tech companies, .com companies now who have data that they need to be cognizant now of legal and privacy implications upfront. So, there is an incredible amount of risk, as you pointed out, of not taking care of things upfront. And if you outgrow your data initiatives without putting those fundamental layers in you're exposing the risk, and those risks are coming out in recent examples we are seeing in breaches. There are numerous examples of companies which have failed to put in a more comprehensive strategy and that has resulted in, you know, data getting exposed in the cloud, employees who are not supposed to have access to the data or have access to the data and it gets leaked. So it's broader implications. There are implications around security, there's implications around breaches, there are implications are on privacy that we are seeing across the board. >> LISA MARTIN: So let's talk about roles and responsibilities now. If we're talking about data access governance, if it's no longer just exclusively the domain of IT or data governance teams, and it's distributed across these teams, do you think that data governance responsibilities need to be shared responsibilities or de-centralized? >> BALAJI GANESAN: Yeah, that's a great question, Lisa, and let's take even Sun Life for example, they are a massive organization, data security organizations, there's compliance teams, and there is data teams. And what most organizations are realizing now at heads, it's untenable, it's not scalable to have one central team being the policeman. It's just not feasible, and it's just not feasible while you can provide mandates. The onus of actually making it happen has to be decentralized and has to be shared across the board with data teams, and data teams have to be trained, have to be enabled to go and share those responsibilities, because you are as good as your weakest link. It doesn't matter if you have a really good mandate at the top, but if there are teams which are doing it more open and don't have those controls built in, the organizations is exposed. And so what organizations, or the most modern organizations are realizing that security governance cannot be always top-down. You can provide a mandate, you can have a central team do that, but it's not feasible for that team to police the entire organization, and you don't want to do that. You don't want to police everybody. You want to encourage people to do the right thing. So the onus and responsibility needs to be distributed apart. And that includes people, that includes processes, that includes technology that needs to come in. And most modern organizations are going towards that world, where they're thinking about your data is distributed everywhere, your business teams are accessing data in their own world, how do you in-build governance into that part? And we are seeing this notion of data mesh coming up more and more in organizations, which is driving the need for my data is distributed, business teams have their own ownership of data, how do you make sure you have a (indistinct) of strategy around leveraging data and analytics around it without the need for data to be copied all into one place and one team doing that. And the connotation of data mesh is coming up more and more, and to realize, the organizations are realizing it's just not feasible for one team to drive all their data initiatives, but they also realizing that governance and security falls in the same boat, right. So you cannot have governance being driven by a governance team and police the entire organization. Your data is going to be used where it is store, business teams are going to be doing on their own. But how do you enable those governance in those shared paradigm is the next evolution of that, and some more organizations are doing that already. >> LISA MARTIN: Let's talk about data sharing, internal data sharing within organizations, having the ownership, the governance, not just sharing it internally within organizations, but across organizations. What are some of the business needs that you guys are seeing in the market? >> BALAJI GANESAN: Yes. So going back to the old business strategy is making sure that organizations can leverage data for driving business agility. So data is not a domain for a specific business groups, but organization how they can break down silos, which are existing in the past and leverage data to the maximum value for the organization. So, if you have a marketing team owning marketing data, can this marketing data be accessed by supply chain teams? Or to get some inputs on customers and how they are behaving? So, it doesn't have a lot of value if marketing team holds that data on its own and leverages that. So organizations are trying, chief data officers, one of the biggest things they are trying to do is, how do you break those silos in and make it a more, a common paradigm? Which means that you need to start sharing data. You may, again, in the data governance paradigm or data mesh paradigm, business owners can still own the data and the marketing team can still own the data, but how can you share the data and make sure, again, governance is maintained? You don't want to go and have a very open sharing mechanism that everybody has access to it. You want to do it in a way that only right people have access to the right data for right purpose. So how do you share that data internally? And then it's the extension of that is organizations want to share data across organizations, whether you're in a healthcare industry, whether you are in consumer tech, and that can drive more business value as part of it. But it's the same paradigm. You don't want to share everything. You want to maintain your IP, you want to maintain the compliance, but how do you leverage the data and unblock those silos? And so, again, going back, the paradigm we live in is how organizations can balance both? How you can share data, break down those silos, but how do you bring governance in and security in? That's the interesting paradigm we live in today. >> LISA MARTIN: That external data sharing, something that you brought up is interesting. If that's not governed secured, I imagine huge challenges and risks for organizations. How does Privacera help with that and some of the other AWS partners in that external data sharing, making sure it's done safely and secure? >> BALAJI GANESAN: Yes, absolutely. And so one of the paradigms, again, our mission for us is, how can help organizations in this dual mandate of sharing data, but preserving compliance, security and privacy within that part of it? What we are doing is we are taking our notch into these controls into the next level of governance, right. So we are providing tools to make it very easy for enterprises to share data internally, as well as externally, without the need for writing a lot of policies as part of it. The traditional paradigm has to be that if you need to share data, you have to go and write a rule and a policy, in every layer of the data exist as part of it. What we are doing is we are abstracting that, and we are providing a very easy mechanism. You'll see more announcements coming up in the next few months around our data sharing paradigm is, can you just make it easy for people to share data on few clicks without the need for writing rules and policies and knowing a lot about underlying databases? And we take all that complexity and we translate that complexity internally. So what we are doing is making it for an organization to share in few clicks a data, a marketing team to share data based on a business purpose, and have time limits around it, have governance around it, but not needing for the marketing team to go and hire somebody to understand and write a policies around that. So removing that friction, part of it, removing those complexity and going back to the role of providing that governance layer of sharing, and it applies to both internal and external sharing, again. Behind the scenes we are leveraging the power of the underlying data platforms. We are leveraging the power of what AWS provides. We have deep integrations with things like Lake Formation and other things which are providing more deeper controls, but those complexities are abstracted for the user, they don't have to understand all of those nuances. They have to simply go and say, I want to share this data with X user. Do I want to do it or not, and if I do it for what purposes? And that's it. And just making that easy enough while taking all the complexity away is what we're doing. Again, going back to the goal. We want users to share data, we want users to leverage data, not be a zero sum game. But how they can do that without the need for hiring, understanding a lot of complexity. With taking over the complexity, what we are seeing that it makes it easier, it's an accelerant, it's a faster time to value. >> LISA MARTIN: Faster time to value also by abstracting the complexities, removing the friction, you probably make workforce productivity and collaboration and partnerships even more valuable. One of the things last question that I wanted to bring up is a marketing term that is one that I, kind of like fingernails on a chalkboard, for me as a marketer it's feature proofing. You know, as we've seen in the last year and a half, there was a a lot of us, a lot of industries that weren't future ready when the pandemic struck. When Privacera thinks of making enterprises ready for the future, as data volumes continue to expand and grow as does sources of data, what is future-proofing for your enterprise customers? What does that mean to you? >> BALAJI GANESAN: Yeah, that's a great question, because we have these conversations with CIOs and Chief Data Officers, and you always look in the prism of not just what organizations are doing today, but what are they going to do three years, five years down the line? And the trends I've talked about in before, the digitization, the public cloud, these are long-term trends, these are happening across the organization. So most organizations, like Sun Life, have data in the cloud. They continue to have data on-premise and they potentially tomorrow can be multicloud as well. And if you look at what is going to happen in the next three, five years is data use is going to accelerate, cloud migration is going to accelerate, users, companies are going to be in hybrid cloud and multicloud, but governance privacy is becoming even more stringent. So the trends are secular trends that are going accelerating. And so what we are doing is not a short term, it's built for the medium and the long-term part of it. And our solution, what we are doing is by abstracting out the complexity, we are also making it easier for organizations to scale. They are not dependent on one platform or a solution. They are dealing at a higher governance level, and we have abstracted out the complexity and dependency with a specific platform. So tomorrow they can switch that and put something else in. They don't have to reinvent those policies. They don't have to reinvent the data sharing paradigm, right. And by abstracting that we are future proofing and in terms of how their data strategy is going to be, and that's the value that we simply add, we can provide. And that's the value that we are providing is you don't have to change your governance when you're changing your data platforms. You don't have to change your governance based on what cloud you are choosing, your governance needs to be stuck, all right. Your governance needs to be strategic, your platforms can change. Privacera is in that, is that glue which is enabling you to have a cohesive long-term strategy, but that is scalable, not just today, but tomorrow in the multicloud and hybrid cloud world. >> LISA MARTIN: Got it, Privacera that glue. Point the audience audience, Balaji, as we wrap things up here, to where they can go to learn more about Privacera, what you guys are able to do, and maybe even find that Sun Life case study. >> BALAJI GANESAN: Absolutely. Bulk of the information is available in privacera.com and so you can go and find us and we'll make those case studies and videos available as well. If you have any questions you can drop a note privacera.com or reach out to any of our account representative. >> LISA MARTIN: And hopefully we'll see you at re:Invent in person, crossing fingers. >> BALAJI GANESAN: Absolutely, looking forward to that. And really looking forward to a world where we can see each other in person and in the conference and in the community together again. So we are really looking forward to that. And we are planning big time to be an active participant in that. >> LISA MARTIN: Excellent, I look forward to that. For Balaji Ganesan, I am Lisa Martin. This has been part of our coverage of the AWS startup showcase new breakthroughs in DevOps, data analytics and cloud management tools. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

(upbeat techno music) >> Welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm Lisa Martin; I am joined by the CEO and co-founder of Privacera, Balaji Ganesan. Balaji, it's great to have you on theCUBE. >> Great to great to see you, Lisa. Good to see you again, and thanks for the opportunity. >> So tell our audience about Privacera. How do you help balance data security, data sharing? >> Absolutely. At Privacera we are on a mission to help enterprises unlock their data, but do it in a secure and a compliant way. We are in this balance between, we call it a dual mandate, where we see enterprise data teams, on one hand, they are being asked to democratize data and make this data available to all parts of the organization. So everybody in the organization is looking forward to get access to the data faster. On the other hand, governance, privacy, and compliance mandates have become more stringent. And it has come from regulations such as GDPR or California Privacy, but in general, the environment and the culture has changed where, from a board level, there's more owners who are making sure that you have visibility on what data you're bringing in, but also make sure that right people have access to the right data. And that notion is no longer in textbooks or in books, right? It's being actually, an onus is on making it happen. And it's really hard for these data teams do that, as the platforms are very diverse. And again, driven by data democratization today, companies are running very diverse platforms. Even in a single cloud like AWS, they have choices between Snowflake or Databricks and Amazon's native tools and other other services, which are really cropping up and being available in the cloud. But if you need to make sure right people have access to the right data, in that paradigm it's really, really hard. And this is where a tool like Privacera comes in, where we can help them get visibility on their data, but also make sure that we can help them with building a unified layer where they can start managing these tools more cohesively. And the end result is they can get access to the data faster, but you're compliant, you're governed, and you have visibility around who's doing what. And that's the big enabler in their data strategy. >> So, we talk about the need for data monetization, for organizations to be able to give enterprise-wide access across business units, to identify new sources of revenue and new opportunities. That's a big challenge to do. You mentioned the security and governance front at the board level. I imagined that the data-sharing is as well. How are you helping customers navigate multiple platforms, multiple clouds, to be able to get access that is actually secure, that the CEO can go back to the board and say we've got everything, you know, all I's dotted and T's crossed here? >> Absolutely, absolutely. I think this is one of the biggest challenges that we have the CIOs face today, is on one hand, they have to be agile to the business and make sure that they're present in the cloud, but they are enabling multiple services that the business needs for agility. And data is being one of the business drivers today, And most companies are becoming data companies. And it is to make decisions to serve your customer better, bring more revenue, cut costs. Even in the midst of COVID, we have seen our customers go in and leverage data to find out how they can shift to a different paradigm of doing business. Now, we had a customer which was primarily in retail stores, but they had to go and shift and analyze data on how they can pivot into a more online world in the COVID paradigm, how they can make supply chain decisions faster. So every company is becoming a data-driven business. The data is becoming the currency. So more units want faster access to the data as possible. But on the other hand, you cannot forget about governance. You can not forget about security, it's becoming a table stakes as part of it. And traditionally, this has been a zero-sum game, where, you know, in order to maintain more security, you cannot give more access to the data or you will make copies of the data, and that creates redundancy. The newer paradigm, in our belief, is that you can do both. And that's how Privacera has built toward. And this is how we are helping our customers in their journey where, you know, if you take Comcast, for example, they're building a massive infrastructure on top of AWS to serve the digital analytics part of it. And they are collecting a lot of data and making decisions based on that. But on the other hand, in order for them to achieve compliance and privacy, there needs to be an approach, a more unified layer, which is not innovating from using the data. And this is where a solution like Privacera is coming in, where we have built an approach, we have built an architecture, where they can enable governance and policies, and these policies are being implemented across the data infrastructure. So it doesn't matter which application you use, where you're coming from, you're governed by the same rules and policies. And that uniformity, that consistency is something we can bring in, of being in horizontal layer and having built those integrations, prebuilt those integrations in. So with Comcast, what the end result they're saying is they can be faster to the market, right? Before us, they would be spending a lot of time with manual processes to build that governance. But with an automated layer, with an automated governance, which has prebuilt integrations into all the layers, they are now able to go to market faster, but now they're going into the market with the governance and the compliance built in, so they can have both. So again, our belief is it's not zero-sum. Your governance, security can be built in with this business agility. And we are helping customers do that. >> You mentioned that retail customer and COVID-19, and we saw a massive pivot about a year and a half ago. And some companies did a great job of pivoting from brick and mortar to curbside delivery, for example, which is table stakes. But we saw so much acceleration of digital transformation last year. How has COVID-19 impacted governance? And what are some of the things that you're helping customers achieve there as they're accelerating their digital journeys? >> Again, going back to the drivers, we are seeing our customers, right? So on one hand, digitization and cloud journey, that accelerated during COVID right? So more companies where they were doing their cloud journey, they accelerated, because they can unlock data faster. And, to my earlier examples, they want to make decisions, leveraging data. And COVID brought that, even accelerated some of these initiatives. So there has been more data initiatives than before. Digitalization has accelerated; cloud migration has accelerated. But COVID also brought in the fact that you are not physically located. You can't sit in a room and trust each other and say, "I trust all of you and I'll give you all equal access." You are now sitting in disparate locations, without the traditional securities you would have, a physical boundary, having that. You're now remote. All of a sudden, the CIOs have to think how we can be more agile? How do you build in security, governance in that layer where you have to think start from bottom staff and then say, are you governing and protecting your data wherever it is stored and being accessed, Rather than relying on perimeter or relying on a physical boundary or being in a physical location. So those traditional paradigms are getting shattered. And most companies have recognized, most forward-looking companies, are recognizing that. They accelerated those trends. And from what we have seen from our point of view is we are able to help in that transformation, both in enabling companies to become digital and democratize data faster, but also building this bottom-up layer where they can be sure that they have visibility on what data they have, but also making sure right people have access to the right data, irrespective of what tool they use, irrespective of where they are set, they're always getting that part of it. And that's a sea change we are seeing in the companies now. So COVID in our industry, in our world, has brought in massive transformation and massive opportunities to set a new paradigm for how organizations treat governance, as well as the data initiative. >> A lot of change that it's brought. Some good, as you've mentioned. Talk to me about, so Privacera is built on Apache Ranger; how are you guys helping AWS customers from a cloud migration perspective? Because we know cloud migration is continuing to accelerate. >> Our foundation, given our work in open source, has always been building around open standards and interoperability, and we believe an enterprise solution needs to be built around these standards that we can talk to. You're not the only solution that enterprises will have. There needs to be interoperability, especially around governance and where we exchanging information, and with other tools. And given a legacy of Ranger, it helps us build those standards. And Ranger as a project today is supported from the likes of Cloudera or in the cloud, Microsoft, AWS, and Google, and most of the forward-looking standards and tools, like Presto and Spark. It has been a de facto standard used by some of these analytical engines. The wide adoption around that, and being built on Ranger gives us that standard of interoperability. So when we go and work with other tools, it makes it easier for us to talk. It makes it easier for organizations to transition in their cloud journey, where they can now very easily move the governance and policies of, even if they are running Ranger on premise, they can easily move those standards, those policies, easily into the cloud. For example, with Sun Life, it was the same case, where they built a lot of these rules and policies in their on-premise environment. Being an insurance company, they always had governance and compliance at top of their mind. Very strict rules around who can access what data and what portions of data, because this data is governed by federal laws, by a lot of the industry laws and mandates and compliance. And they always had this notion in on-premise. Now when they're migrating to the cloud, one of the bottlenecks is how do you move this governance and do you have to build it from scratch? But with our tool and the standards we have built in, we can migrate that in days rather than months. So for them, we help in the overall cloud migration. To my earlier point, we are helping customers achieve faster time to market by enabling this governance and making it easier. And by having this open standard, it makes it easier for customers to migrate and then cooperate, rather than having to build it again, having to reinvent the wheel when they migrate to the cloud. Because, the governance and compliance mandates are not changing when you go from prem to cloud. In fact cloud, in some cases, it's more diverse. So by helping organizations do that, we are helping them achieve a faster acceleration, which is the case happened in Sun Life. >> That time to market is absolutely imperative. If anything, we've learned in the last 18 months, it's businesses that needed to pivot overnight multiple times. And they need to be able to get to market faster, whether it's pivoting from being a brick and mortar, to being able to deliver a curbside delivery. The time to market, people don't have that time, regardless of industry, because there's competitors in the rear-view mirror who might be smaller, more agile, and able to get to market faster. So these bigger companies, and any company, needs to have a faster time to market. >> Yeah, absolutely. And that's what we are seeing. And that's big driver for journey into the cloud is to bring that agility. In the earlier paradigm, you're going to have a monolithical technology standard, and you can adopt changes faster when you are reliant on the IT team. What cloud brings in is, you can now move data into the cloud and enable any service and any team faster than ever before. You can enable a team on Snowflake, you can enable a team on a different machine learning tool, all having access to the same data, without it being the need for the data to be copied and servers built out. The cloud is really bringing that digital transformation, but it's also bringing in the agility of being faster and nimble and as part of it. But the challenge for cloud is it's happening at the same time governance, privacy has become real. And organizations no longer can be assuming that, you know, they can just move data into the cloud and be done with it. You have to really think about all layers of the cloud and say, how do you make sure that data is protected on all layers, in all consumption? How do you make sure that right people have access to the right data? And that's a much comprehensive problem, given the world that we are now not sitting in a physical office anymore, we are distributed. How do you do that? So while cloud brings that business agility, it's also happening, not because of cloud, but because of the climate we are in, that governance and compliance is real. And most forward-looking organizations are thinking about how they can build a foundation that can handle both. How they can build, institutionalize these governance frameworks in the newer paradigms of cloud. We are seeing the companies implementing what is called a data mesh, which is essentially a concept of how the data could be decentralized and owned by business owners and teams. But how do you bring governance in that? How do you make sure that a layer of that, and then a newer paradigm most forward-looking organizations are adopting is, governance doesn't need to be managed by one team. It can be a distributed function. But can you institutionalize a foundation or a framework, and you have pools which can be used by different teams. So they are bound by the same rules, but they're operating in their own independent way. And that's the future for us, is how the organizations can figure out how in the cloud, they can have a more distributed, delegated, decentralized governance that aligns with their business strategy of self-service analytics and use of data across multiple teams, but all bound by the same framework, all bound by common rules so that you're not building your own; the tools and the methods are all common, but each team is able to operate independently. And that's where the agility, true agility, will come in, when organizations are able to do that. And I think we are in probably step one or two of the journey. It's fascinating to see some of the organizations take leaps in that. But for us, the future is how if some organizations can build those foundations in from processes and people, they can truly unlock the power of the cloud. >> You brought in technology and people; last question is, how do you advise customers when you're in conversations? We talked about data access, governance, security, being a board-level conversation, the ability for an organization to monetize their data; but how do you talk about that balance when you're with customers? That's a tricky line. >> And what we say to the customer, it's a journey. You don't have to think of solving this on day one. What we really think about is foundational steps you need to do to achieve that journey. And what are the steps you can do today? And add onto it, rather than trying to solve for everything on day one. And that's what most of the focus areas goes in, is how we can help our customers put together a program which achieves both their data strategy and aligns their governance with it. And most forward-looking organizations are already doing that, where they have a multi-year journey that they're already working on. They are thinking about some of the things that we help with. And in some cases, when organizations are not thinking about it, we come and help and advise with that. Our advice always is, start thinking about today and what your next two or three years is going to look like. We put together a program. And that involves tools, that involves people, and that involves organization structure. And we are a cog in the wheel, but we also recommend them to look at, holistically, all the aspects. And that's our job at the end of the day as vendors in this industry, to help collectively learn from customers what we are learning and can help the next set of customers coming. But we believe, again, going back to my point, if organizations are able to set up this paradigm where they're able to set structures, where they can delegate governance, but they build those common rules and frameworks upfront, they are set up to succeed in the future. They can be more agile than their competitors. >> And that is absolutely table stakes these days. Balaji, thank you so much for joining, telling our audience about Privacera, what you're doing, how you're helping customers, particularly AWS customers, migrate to the cloud in such a dynamic environment. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much. It was a pleasure talking to you and I appreciate it. >> Likewise. For Balaji Ganesan, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this CUBE Conversation. (upbeat music)