Hey, Sparky: Confused by data science governance and security in the cloud? Databricks promises to ease machine learning pipelines

Databricks, the company behind analytics tool Apache Spark, is introducing new features to ease the management of security, governance and administration of its machine learning platform. Security and data access rights have been fragmented between on-premises data, cloud instances and data platforms, Databricks told us. And the new approach allows tech teams to manage policies from a single environment and have them replicated in the cloud, it added. "Cloud companies have inherent native security controls, but it can be a very confusing journey for these customers moving from an on-premise[s] world where they have their own governance in place, controlling who has access to what, and then they move this up to the cloud and suddenly all the rules are different." The idea behind the new features is to allow users to employ the controls they are familiar with, for example, Active Directory to control data policies in Databricks.