Confluent Strengthens Data Access Controls with Q2 Product Release

Confluent, the streaming data platform built on top of the Apache Kafka project, announced its Q2 product update with multiple capabilities, including enhanced role-based data access controls for enterprises.

Today, organizations around the world are tempted to take advantage of cloud computing and avoid the operational overhead of infrastructure management. However, when migrating to the cloud, data security becomes a major concern. Companies want to ensure that only the right people have access to the right data, but mastering this aspect down to individual Apache Kafka topics takes a lot of time and resources. After all, there are plenty of complex scripts that one would have to deal with to set permissions.

Last year, Confluent introduced role-based access controls for Confluent Cloud customers to help them streamline this process for critical resources such as production environments, sensitive clusters, and billing data. Now the company is taking the feature a step forward to cover access to individual Kafka resources, including topics, consumer groups, and transaction IDs.

This allows organizations to set clear roles and responsibilities for administrators, operators, and developers, giving them access to only the data specifically needed to perform their work across both data and control planes.

Greater visibility

In addition to security, the company is also improving the observability element of its solution with new capabilities for Confluent Cloud Metrics API that allow organizations to easily understand the use of data streams in their business and sub-departments to see where and how resources are being used and provide real-time insights to ensure ensure mission-critical services always meet customer expectations.

The company has also built a premium integration with Grafana Cloud, allowing enterprises to gain visibility into their Confluent Cloud instance from the monitoring tool. Previously, it had also built integrations with Datadog and Prometheus.

Improved uptime

Finally, Confluent offers a 99.99% uptime SLA (service level agreement) for both standard and dedicated fully managed multi-zone clusters. This, the company explained, includes not only infrastructure, but Apache Kafka performance, critical bug fixes and security updates, allowing organizations to run sensitive, mission-critical data streaming workloads in the cloud with confidence. It has also introduced recipes to help businesses get started with stream processing and the use cases it enables.

This post Confluent Strengthens Data Access Controls with Q2 Product Release

was original published at “https://venturebeat.com/2022/04/19/confluent-strengthens-data-access-controls-with-q2-product-release/”