Okera, the universal data authorization company, empowers enterprises to accelerate business agility, minimizes data security risks and demonstrates regulatory compliance

If your data is locked away in cold storage, or locked down because only a few people need it, you don’t need Okera.

But if your organization invested in a team of data analysts and data scientists, chances are very high that they complain that data security approvals and privacy concerns are slowing them down and delaying their progress.

Perhaps your data democratization efforts aren’t returning the results you were promised. Or you want to move sensitive data workloads to the cloud so you can innovate faster and cost-effectively, but security and compliance concerns are holding you back.

In all these cases, you need to use your data to drive the business forward, and you absolutely need Okera.

Okera was founded in 2016 by technology pioneers who saw that the big innovation in big data — specifically the separation of storage and compute — created a big gap in data security.

At the same time, organizations started accumulating massive amounts of data. A lot of that data was and still is personally identifiable information (PII) that many citizens of the world want to keep private. Governments responded with data privacy regulations, most prominently GDPR.

Okera’s first customer is a widely recognized global brand, and they came to us because they needed to allow advanced data analytics on a variety of compute platforms while complying with the Dutch Personal Data Protection Act (WBP). Several innovations later, and Okera is now trusted to authorize access to hundreds of petabytes of sensitive data for the world’s most demanding companies and even regulatory agencies themselves.

Okera Platform Features

Universal Policy Management

Simplify and standardize powerful fine-grained access control policies. Write once, apply everywhere.

Dynamic Policy Authorization

Enforce sophisticated data security and privacy policies for every data access request at run-time. Filter, hide, mask, and tokenize sensitive data as queried.

Data Usage Intelligence

Accelerate compliance reporting and discover and remediate inappropriate data usage. Know who has access to sensitive data, and how and when they used it.

FGAC

Provision and restrict access to data at the column, row, and cell level with conditional logic in order to comply with data security mandates and privacy regulation.

RBAC and ABAC

Simplify and generalize policies based on common user roles with Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). Define rich policies leveraging metadata, user attributes, and real-time context with Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) in order to scale policy enforcement over time.

Distributed Stewardship

Administrators configure the platform and set global data policy. Data registration and policy management can be delegated to the business domain stewards.

Universal Client & Programmatic Access

Okera provides native client libraries, a BI Gateway for JDBC/ODBC connectivity, and a REST API for programmatic enforcement requests.

Push-Down Policy Enforcement

For high-performing systems, Okera intercepts the query, rewrites it (masking, tokenization, etc), then pushes the authorized query down to the underlying data source for the fastest possible query performance.

Scale Policy Enforcement

Isolate direct data access with Okera nScale™ so public cloud compute frameworks only work with authorized data. On-cluster co-location delivers speed and elastic scalability.

Authentication

Authenticate every request in real time, integrated with enterprise authentication and Single Sign-On (SSO) solutions: oAuth, SAML (Okta, Ping), Microsoft Active Directory, and more.

Active Metadata Registry

Keep authorization policies up-to-date with real-time user and data attributes. Integrate with your identity access management system and enterprise data catalog, and/or use Okera’s ML-powered data discovery to automatically detect and tag sensitive data.

Automation and APIs

Leverage Python, Java, and REST APIs for custom integrations and enterprise workflow automation.

Discover Okera’s Data Privacy Solutions for Retail and Ecommerce

Customer service is fundamental to the retail and ecommerce industries, and a vital piece of that customer service is data protection. As competition increases among retailers, many utilize targeted, personalized marketing campaigns to acquire new customers and provide a more customized experience. With this comes the responsibility to protect customer data while still being able to gain important insights from the data collected.

What Data Privacy Consists of in Retail and Ecommerce

Customer data privacy refers to how companies and third-party agencies collect, use, store, and protect data from transactions, such as contact information, passwords and usernames, web-browsing cookies, purchase history, website behaviors, identifiable information, and app engagement.

Learning this information about target customers can help retailers create more personalized customer profiles for marketing purposes, but there are customer privacy laws to follow, and data breaches are more common than you may realize.

Nong Li, Co-Founder & CEO

Nong co-founded Okera in 2016. Prior to that, he led performance engineering for Spark core and SparkSQL at Databricks. Before Databricks, he served as the tech lead for the Impala project at Cloudera. Nong is also one of the original authors of the Apache Parquet project. He has a bachelor’s in computer science from Brown University.

“The Okera Dynamic Access Platform automatically authorizes and audits all data requests, dynamically enforcing data security and compliance policies.”