Okera Expands Its Footprint with AWS to Power Universal Data Authorization

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Okera, the Universal Data Authorization company, today announced it has expanded its capabilities with Amazon Web Services (AWS), introducing new integrations and product editions that allow customers to maximize the value of their investment on AWS. Okera's first platform-specific edition, Okera for Amazon EMR, allows customers to protect the confidential, personally identifiable, and regulated data stored on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and processed on the massively scalable Amazon EMR. The second platform-specific edition will be Okera for Snowflake, announced earlier this month, which will be publicly available exclusively on AWS in early 2022.

The Okera Dynamic Access Platform (ODAP) empowers enterprises to democratize their data on AWS with clarity and consistency across multiple big data frameworks. This enables data and analytics leaders to share data with confidence across the enterprise, knowing that data access policies are being enforced for regulatory compliance. With Okera, companies can define and manage fine-grained access policies from an intuitive, no-code policy builder and have them applied consistently and dynamically.

"Okera's data authorization solution with fine-grained access control enables us to open our data for analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence," said Assaf Liebstein, Senior Data Platform Engineer at Yotpo. "Without worrying about who is accessing data when and where, we're able to accelerate innovation to be a true data-driven company."

"We value strategic companies like Okera that use AWS as their reference platform for cloud solutions and that provide a tremendous value-add for our customers," said Sabina Joseph, GM, Technology Partners at AWS. "Thanks to innovative solutions like Okera's universal data authorization platform, AWS is able to provide our customers with more opportunities to leverage the cloud to gain insight into their data, faster and more cost-effectively, while ensuring security and governance at scale."

"We are always excited to expand our support of AWS technologies and make it easier for enterprises to build the future of their business on AWS," said Nick Halsey, Okera CEO. "The Okera platform makes it even easier to access data for innovation and growth while ensuring accurate, comprehensive data governance and regulatory compliance."

Okera for Amazon EMR
Enterprises use Amazon EMR to run and scale Apache Spark, Hive, Presto and other big data workloads, simplifying the management of their infrastructure and accelerating their time to value. Available exclusively in AWS Marketplace, Okera for Amazon EMR enables customers to enjoy the cost savings and flexibility of Amazon EMR with sensitive data protection from Okera, simplifying fine-grained access control and row level security on Apache Spark, Hive, and Presto. Users can dynamically filter, hide, mask, tokenize, and anonymize sensitive data on Amazon S3. Visit the Okera blog to learn how FINRA, which uses Okera to secure data processed on Amazon EMR, achieved radical improvements to their analytics capabilities at more manageable costs.

Okera for Snowflake
Okera for Snowflake gives all data stakeholders the opportunity to work together to define rich data privacy and security policies, automatically enforce dynamic access policies in a blink-of-an-eye, and continuously monitor who has access to, and who has accessed confidential, PII, and other regulated data. Okera for Snowflake will be delivered as a software as a solution (SaaS) application. 

Key Okera Integrations with AWS
Okera is an AWS Data and Analytics Competency Partner with a majority of customers running in production on AWS. Key product integrations include:

• AWS Glue Data Catalog: Okera can build rich data access control policies on top of the technical metadata stored in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. This allows customers to simplify and standardize by referring to an existing AWS Glue Data Catalog as the Single Source of Truth (SoT) for technical metadata.
• Amazon Athena: Joint customers enjoy the on-demand flexibility of the serverless interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3, where Okera provides seamless query authorization and policy enforcement.
• Amazon Redshift: For customers who prefer a dedicated cloud data warehouse, Okera authorizes queries and enforces data access policies on-the-fly.
• Amazon EMR running Apache Spark, Hive, or Presto: Okera's unique nScale™ data security was originally designed and proven on massive EMR clusters. nScale isolates access to Amazon S3 data so compute frameworks only work with authorized data. On-cluster co-location delivers perfect elastic scalability so joint customers get the additional sensitive data protection they need from Okera without compromising any of the power, cost savings, and flexibility they gain from Amazon EMR.

Visit Okera at re:Invent 2021 November 29th - December 3rd at booth #257. The company will be showcasing its AWS solutions in addition to offering an early access program to qualifying participants for its Okera for Snowflake solution.

About Okera
Okera, the Universal Data Authorization company, helps modern, data-driven enterprises accelerate innovation, minimize data security risks, and demonstrate regulatory compliance. The Okera Dynamic Access Platform automatically enforces universal fine-grained access control policies. This allows employees, customers, and partners to use data responsibly, while protecting them from inappropriately accessing data that is confidential, personally identifiable, or regulated. Okera's robust audit capabilities and data usage intelligence deliver the real-time and historical information that data security, compliance, and data delivery teams need to respond quickly to incidents, optimize processes, and analyze the performance of enterprise data initiatives.

Okera began development in 2016 and now dynamically authorizes access to hundreds of petabytes of sensitive data for the world's most demanding F100 companies and regulatory agencies. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and is backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, ClearSky Security, and Felicis Ventures. For more information, visit www.okera.com or contact [email protected], or connect with the team on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter.

SOURCE Okera