Accelerate and Simplify Data Governance with Databricks Unity Catalog and Lovelytics

Embarking on a journey toward data excellence requires more than just technological prowess; it demands a strategic approach that unifies, organizes, and empowers every facet of your data ecosystem. The expert advisors and engineers at Lovelytics understand the pivotal role that efficient data management plays in driving business success. Join us as we explore the myriad of features and functionalities that Databricks Unity Catalog brings to the table to unlock a new era of collaboration, governance, and unparalleled insights. You will discover how your organization can harness the full potential of Unity Catalog to streamline data workflows, enhance collaboration, and pave the way for advanced analytics and machine learning endeavors. Welcome to a realm where data becomes not just information, but a strategic asset driving innovation and informed decision-making.

DATA GOVERNANCE CHALLENGES:

Data is the lifeblood of every modern organization, but securing and governing data, while driving scale and innovation can be complex. These challenges make a data governance initiative challenging- and it doesn’t have to be. Our clients across all sizes and industries face common challenges while pursuing their data governance goals.

• DATA SILOS: Many organizations have data spread out across their enterprise, or even within a given data lake, without a simple way to view it all in a unified location. 

• DATA GOVERNANCE: Without proper governance, data is often inaccurate, permissioned incorrectly, and generally less reliable. High quality governance enables the business to know what data is being used and by whom. Ensuring accurate, up-to-date data is provisioned only for those that need it is paramount.

• DATA LINEAGE: New data creation and changes to your existing data are happening every second, but it’s often difficult to understand how it moves from creation to application. The ability to see where data is being changed or added as it makes its way through your data ecosystem helps to understand potential issues or opportunities to enrich your data.

• DATA AUDITING: Companies often struggle to identify who is making changes to data, when they made them, and why- leading to challenges across the enterprise. Your business needs to ensure access is being consistently managed and only those who need access, have it. Moreover, many businesses have various regulatory requirements to report data controls to outside entities and need an easy way to meet these requirements.

UNIFIED GOVERNANCE SOLUTIONS:

To overcome these challenges, organizations are leveraging Databricks Unity Catalog – the unified approach to governance and security within the Data Intelligence Platform. Unity Catalog not only streamlines data discovery, but also fosters collaboration across departments, resulting in improved operational efficiency and faster time-to-insight. 

UNITY CATALOG ENABLES:

SECURE DATA COLLABORATION AND PRODUCTIVITY:

• Securely share live data across clouds, platforms, and on-prem 
• Consume shared data using tools and platforms of your choice, reducing time-to-value
• Unity Catalog and Delta Sharing enable securely sharing live data across clouds, platforms, and on-prem with full visibility and access controls
• Accelerate time to value with low latency data discovery
• Quickly identify and diagnose code changes with rich visualizations
• Sits at the heart of the Data Intelligence Platform to streamline the workflow for data scientists, allowing them to seamlessly leverage metadata within their ML projects

• AUDIT VERIFY:
  • Get an end-to-end visibility into how data flows in your organization from source to consumption
  • Centrally manage, monitor and audit usage to shared data with ease
• UNIFIED GOVERNANCE:
  • Create a single source of truth for your data estate with centralized metadata and user management
  • Unity catalog is the first industry solution to give a single pane of glass over all data and machine learning assets across the enterprise.
  • With Lakehouse Federation, you can view and manage assets and lineage across a variety of major data platforms, including
• DATA DISCOVERY FOR ML AND AI:
  • Reduction of time for data scientists searching for and preparing data for ML tasks to accelerate the data preparation phase of ML projects
  • Enables data discovery by allowing users to search and explore datasets, understand their schema, and assess data quality
• UNLOCKS FUTURE POTENTIAL:
  • Apart from providing a governance model, upgrading to Unity Catalog also unlocks additional groundbreaking features to accelerate time to data value:
    • Lakehouse IQ
    • TCO Reduction Using Serverless
    • Databricks Assistant

LOVELYTICS EXPERTISE TO ADVISE AND DELIVER: 

Upgrading existing Databricks deployments or implementing Unity Catalog on a new Databricks Lakehouse requires an experienced partner and thoughtful approach.

• BRING MORE TO THE TABLE: While 70-90% of existing tables can be upgraded, the remaining tables do not fall under a quick deployment method. These require expert knowledge of the legacy hive metastore to resolve.
• UNITY CATALOG IMPACTS ALMOST EVERYTHING: Table upgrades is only the first step. Planning and implementing UC-compatible clusters, workflows, table references, mount points, and other Databricks assets is nuanced and time-consuming. Lovelytics has tried and tested approaches and knowledge to expedite the peripherals.
• FREEDOM CREATES COMPLEXITY OF SCALE: The three-level namespace requires careful planning to scale across environments, business units, and use cases. Lovelytics has experience in catalog designing for major organizations in every industry.
• UNLOCK THE FULL POTENTIAL OF UNITY CATALOG: Getting started can be challenging, but unlocking the full benefit of Unity Catalog is an ongoing process. As a Databricks partner, Lovelytics can make sure you’re not only using the latest features from Volumes to Lakehouse Federation, but train your team to make them top-tier UC experts.

Data Governance with Lovelytics and Databricks Unity Catalog: Lovelytics has successfully deployed Unity Catalog across clients of all sizes and industries. 

CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY IN HEALTHCARE LIFE SCIENCES (HLS):

As experts in regulated industries like HLS, we were able to help a Fortune 250 medical device company meet rigorous compliance requirements and achieve their data governance strategic imperatives. As a result, they enhanced their metastore management, end-to-end governance, and audit logging processes. Additionally, the customer required Unity Catalog to be implemented on two separate Databricks tenants.

• Lovelytics upgraded two large Databricks deployments with multi-regional architecture to leverage Unity Catalog. We migrated all workspaces, upgraded all permissions, adopted brand new features for managing streaming workloads, and advised the customer on how to manage new process flows with Unity Catalog.
• Both Accounts and all workloads were migrated with zero-impact to up-time or service. The customer also achieved a higher level of data governance on all of their analytic workloads, including streaming data workloads without compromising data privacy and IP control.

TAKE ACTION:

With our expert data advisory and solution delivery excellence, our clients find Unity Catalog contributes to a more efficient and collaborative data management environment, enabling businesses to derive greater value from their data assets while maintaining governance and control.

We bring specialized experience to tailor implementation to suit your specific needs and goals across complex implementations. Our deep understanding of best practices, potential challenges, and optimal configurations, ensuring a smoother and more effective implementation to quickly derive value from investment. 

Deploying technology solutions that facilitate data governance processes is essential. Equally important is investing in ongoing training to ensure that employees understand the importance of data governance and are equipped to adhere to established protocols.

Lovelytics is a certified, premier Databricks services partner and has successfully deployed Unity Catalog and the entire Data Intelligence Platform across clients of all sizes and industries on AWS, Azure, and GCP. We optimize the process, reduce risks, and ensure that your organization maximizes the benefits of your data management implementation quickly.

Ready to get started with your Unity Catalog deployment? Contact us to learn more!