 Welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm Lisa Martin. I'm joined by the CEO and co-founder of Privacera, Balaji Ganesan. Balaji, it's great to have you on theCUBE. Great to see you Lisa, good to see you again and thanks for the opportunity. See, yeah, so tell our audience about Privacera. How do you help balance data security, data sharing? Absolutely. The Privacera, we are in a mission to help enterprises unlock their data but do it in a secure and a compliant way. We are in this balance between what we call as 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 culture has changed where from a board level, there's more owners on making sure that your visibility and 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, it's being actually making and the owners is on making it happen. And it's really hard for these data teams to do that as when 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 services which are really propping up and being available in the cloud. But if you need to make sure right people have access to 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 these building and unified layer where they can start managing these tools more cohesively. And at 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 a big enabler in their data strategy. So we talk about the need for data monetization for organizations to be able to give enterprise white access across business units to identify new sources of revenue and new opportunities. That's a big challenge to do. You mentioned that the security and governance front at the board level. I mentioned 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. All eyes dotted and teeth crossed here. Absolutely, absolutely. I think this is one of the biggest challenges that we have as the CIOs face today is they are being 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 going and leverage data to find out how they can shift to a different paradigm of doing in business. 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 decision. The data is becoming the currency. So more units want faster access to the data as possible. But on the other hand, you have to, you cannot forget about governance, you cannot forget about security is becoming a table stakes as part of it. And traditionally this has been a zero sum game where 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 is in our belief is that you can do more. And that's how privacy has built towards. And this is how we are helping our customers in their journey where, take Comcast for example, they are building a massive infrastructure on top of AWS to serve their 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 or more unified layer which is not innovating from using the data. And this is where the 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 their data infrastructure. So it doesn't matter which application we 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, a being an horizontal layer and having built those integration, pre-built those integrations in. So with Comcast, what the end result they're saying is they can be faster to the market, right? And 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 is pre-built integrations into all the layers, they are now able to go to market faster, but they're going into the market with the governance and the compliance filter so they can have both. So again, our belief is it's not zero sum. You've governance, security can be built in with this missus agility and we are helping customers do that. You mentioned that retail customer and COVID-19 and we saw 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 stage. 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? I mean, going back to the drivers, we are seeing our customers, right? So 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 this initiative. So there has been more data initiatives than before, digitization 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 our physical boundary or having that you're now remote. All of a sudden, the CIS have to think to be how we can be more agile, how do you build insecurity governance in that layer where you have the things start from bottom up and then say, are you governing protecting your data wherever it is stored and being accessed rather than relying on perimeter or being relying on a physical boundary or being in a physical location. So those traditional paradigms are getting shattered and the most companies have recognized most forward-looking companies by recognizing that they accelerated those trends. And from what we have seen from our point of views we are able to help in that transformation in both enabling companies to become digital and democratize data faster but also building this bottom up layer where they can be sure that data is being 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're set they're always getting that part of it. And that's the 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 mentioned, talk to me about so predecessor 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 on open standards and interoperability. And we believe an enterprise solution needs to be built on 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 very 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 cloud era 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 defective standard used by some of these analytical engine. The wide adoption around that and a big 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're running Ranger on premise they can easily move those standards those policies easily into the cloud. And that, for example, with SunLife 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? 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 and 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 interoperate 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 prime to on-cloud. It's in fact cloud in some cases is more diverse. But so by helping organizations do that we are helping them achieve a faster acceleration which is the case happened in some way. 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 rearview 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 a big driver for the journey into the cloud is to bring that agility. So in the earlier paradigm you're going to have a monolithical technology standards and you couldn't adopt changes faster when you're 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 where you can enable a team on a different machine learning tool all having access to the same data without it being the need of the data to be copied in a servers built out. So cloud is really bringing that digital transformation but it's also bringing in the agility of being faster and nimble 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 they can just move data into the cloud and be done with, they have to really think about all layers of the cloud and say, how do you make sure that data is protected on all layers, 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 organization are thinking about how they can build a foundation that can handle both. It's how they can build institutionalized these governance frameworks. In wherever the newer paradigms of cloud is, how we are seeing cloud with companies implementing is 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 the paradigm, the newer paradigm most forward-looking organizations are adopting is governance can be, doesn't need to be managed by one team, it can be a distributed function. And but can you institutionalize a foundation or a framework and you have pools which can be used by the same different teams. So they're 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 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 their journey. It's fascinating to see some of the organizations take leaves on that. But for us, the future is how some organization can build those foundations in from a processes and people they can truly unlock the power of 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 is a journey. You don't have to think about 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 our most of 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're 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 you start thinking about today and what your next two or three years is going to look like and 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 help the next set of customers come in. But we believe, again, going back to my point if organizations are able to set up this paradigm where they're able to set up 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.