Starburst adds tools to enhance its data mesh capabilities

Starburst Data added data sharing and governance tools to boost the data mesh capabilities of its analytics platform.

The data and analytics vendor, founded in 2017 and based in Boston, enables customers to build a data mesh architecture, which is a decentralized approach to data management and analytics.

Data mesh removes responsibility for an organization’s data and analytics from a centralized data team by enabling data teams within different domains, such as human resources, finance and sales, to manage and analyze their own data.

Its purpose is to reduce the bottlenecks that often result from a centralized approach to data while also taking advantage of the domain knowledge of data experts within an organizational domain. The theory behind the approach is that an expert in finance data will be better at working with finance data than a data generalist.

While parsing out the oversight and analysis of data to domain experts, data mesh also connects an organization’s various domains with data catalogs and data integration capabilities to enable the sharing of data products and cross-domain analysis.

In addition to Starburst, vendors specializing in data mesh include Talend, Informatica and Denodo.

Starburst’s new features are built on Starburst Stargate, a gateway for Starburst Enterprise customers to perform analysis on data distributed across the globe both without moving it and also while meeting data sovereignty regulations. Meanwhile, the capabilities — unveiled on Sept. 21 at the Big Data London conference — are aimed at enhancing Starburst customers’ ability to develop and share data products used for analytics, such as applications, models and dashboards that they build using global data sets. In particular, two new governance tools have the potential to enable users to more easily share and analyze data gathered across borders, according to Kevin Petrie, analyst at Eckerson Group. Data masking and cell-level filtering ensure that only specific users and user groups are able to view and work with certain data products and other data assets. And exception-based policies for certain data products and data assets now enable authorized users to circumvent certain policies while reducing the onus on administrators to manage data security. “The fine-grained security controls — the data masking and cell-level filtering — should significantly improve the ability of Starburst customers to reduce the risk of cross-border activities,” Petrie said. “And the exception-based policies for data products should make governance easier for data teams.” Data often resides across borders and clouds, forcing organizations to adhere to a myriad of compliance regulations, which can severely limit insights due to partial data access. These enhancements are in response to that challenge.