Securing Sensitive Data in Databricks

Varonis is now a Validated ISV Partner of Databricks. This means their integration with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform has been validated to ensure it adheres to the best practices of an integration. Customers can use Databricks for analytics, data science, and AI, with the added confidence that Varonis provides an extra layer of protection for their critical data.

Databricks makes it easy for analysts and data scientists to access, create, and share data while building models at massive scale. With the flexibility and scale Databricks provides, sensitive data is often created dynamically as part of collaboration and model development. Organizations need continuous visibility to find, fix, and alert on security risks as new data is created.

Varonis for Databricks

The Varonis Data Security Platform provides an end-to-end approach that protects data at every step. Varonis automatically identifies new sensitive data as it is created, helps customers right-size access, and detects suspicious access patterns.

These capabilities enable customers to automatically protect their business-critical data and reduce their blast radius without slowing down their speed of progress.

In this blog, we’ll discuss how Varonis can help secure your sensitive data by:

• Continuously discovering and classifying sensitive data
• Analyzing risk and exposure
• Detecting active threats
• Accelerating investigations and remediation

Varonis is a leading Data Security Platform that makes it easy to protect your data with unmatched visibility and automation.

Continuously discover and classify sensitive data.

When working with Databricks data, you must first know where it resides, what it is, and whether it’s at risk. Varonis provides deep visibility into sensitive data in Databricks, accurately discovering and classifying sensitive information down to the table and column level.

Varonis creates a complete, up-to-date picture of your data in the context of its sensitivity, concentration, and exposure. Moreover, Varonis continuously discovers and classifies newly created sensitive data. As your data scientists, engineers, and analysts create new models, metrics, table merges, and other outputs containing sensitive data, Varonis will automatically surface it, right-size access, and monitor it against misuse.

With this comprehensive understanding of your sensitive data, you can see exactly where it resides, who has access to it, and whether it is at risk. Our extensive library of built-in classifiers categorizes sensitive and regulated data, including PII, financial data, intellectual property, and AI training data.

Varonis provides a unified view of your data within the broader context of your entire data estate. With this single-pane-of-glass view, you can easily identify where your sensitive data is at risk and if there are any gaps in your security posture.

Analyze risk and exposure.

While Databricks provides fine-grained access controls, it can be difficult to get a clear, end-to-end view of who has access to sensitive data and how that access is granted.

With a deep understanding of the interconnection between identities, permissions, and data, Varonis enables you to actively remediate issues in Databricks, including identity-based attacks that often lead to a data breach, like phishing and social engineering.

Building on Databricks’ existing access controls, Varonis presents an end-to-end view of identities, groups, shares, databases, schemas, tables, and columns in an easy-to-parse CRUDS model (create, read, update, delete, and share).

With this information, Varonis identifies risks like sensitive data shared externally, shadow admin accounts, and configurations that deviate from best practices or are misconfigured.

Detect active threats.

Varonis uses predictive, behavior-based threat models to proactively detect threats, including sharing sensitive data and abnormal logins to suspicious admin activity. High-fidelity alerts inform you of potential threats before they become breaches.

Using machine learning to build baselines for every unique user and device in your environment, hundreds of expert-built threat models alert you to unusual access activity, permissions changes, data transfers, and more.

Accelerate investigations and remediation.

A granular cross-cloud audit trail of events makes it simple to understand how your data is being used and by whom. This allows you to easily investigate threats, including lateral movement, across Databricks and your entire cloud environment. With an enriched and filterable activity log, you can conduct advanced forensics investigations on suspicious or admin activity and take the pain out of regulatory audits.

End-to-end data security Varonis offers a unified Data Security Platform for all your critical data with an end-to-end approach that protects your data at every step. Our Platform helps your team easily monitor and improve your organization’s Databricks data security posture, minimize sensitive data risk, and defend against the threat of data breach.

Ready to secure your most sensitive Databricks data and improve your security posture? Try Varonis for free and request a demo today.