Enterprises’ sensitive and business-critical data needs to be secured and protected. Security best practices are baked into every step of the data ingestion process at Fivetran, and for those businesses with advanced security needs, we offer Fivetran Business Critical — the most reliable and secure cloud data integration platform available. 

Private networking for regulated industries and sensitive data

A key feature of the Business Critical plan is private networking (with AWS PrivateLink or Azure Private Link), which establishes a connection between your source systems and your destination, so that your data can be sent without ever being exposed to the public internet.

With data security now a regular board agenda item, security and IT teams need to ensure that the data is handled in line with industry compliance standards and internal policy requirements. This is especially important in highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services.

Private networking provides enterprises with peace of mind that their data is secure, reducing the risk of data breaches. Fivetran manages this complexity, so data engineers don’t have to spend their limited time becoming security experts, freeing their time to deliver more data projects and initiatives.  

As the recipient of this year’s Databricks Data Ingestion Partner of the Year Award, we are excited to be building a tighter, more secure integration with our partner. Fivetran is extending our private networking support to Databricks — specifically, PrivateLink for AWS and Private Link for Azure. Databricks technology is bringing the data warehouse and lake together to create a lakehouse environment for scalable data analytics. Private networking supports our joint customers’ secure movement of data to the cloud, which fuels downstream analytics, AI/ML and data exploration.

“Fivetran and Databricks complement each other well,” said Brandon Beidel, Director of Product Management, Data Platform, for Red Ventures. “Fivetran allows our engineering team to move faster by eliminating repetitive data ingestion tasks, while Databricks provides a platform with the power and scale needed for data engineering and analytics on what we have ingested.”

Key benefits of private networking support

With private networking, you control how data traffic reaches your Databricks destination. This provides several important benefits:

• Secure communication between Fivetran’s cloud environment and your Databricks environment
• Ability to use AWS PrivateLink or Azure Private Link to connect to key data sources and ensure the entire pipeline avoids the internet and exposure risk is reduced
• Eliminates the need for ongoing maintenance of the connection and avoids any risk of data exposure by misconfiguration or security vulnerability 
• Reduces dependency on the IT team to set up proxies between sources and destinations as a stopgap for traffic control
• Securely accelerates the migration of data to the cloud for analytics
• Supports your ability to meet regulatory compliance requirements
• Reduces your overall data stack infrastructure complexity

How to set up private networking for Databricks

How you connect your data sources will depend on whether your Databricks instance is hosted on AWS or Azure. Here’s how it works in each case:

‍AWS PrivateLink: For an end-to-end PrivateLink connection, you’ll enable AWS PrivateLink between your AWS account (Databricks data plane) and Databricks AWS account (control plane). Fivetran will establish a PrivateLink connection with Databricks AWS account (control plane). Once these steps are complete, just choose “PrivateLink” for the connection method in your Fivetran dashboard.

Azure Private Link: For Databricks on Azure, Azure Private Link connection is set up between Fivetran and your workspace(s). You’ll expose your Databricks workspace Private Link service “Resource ID” or “Alias” that Fivetran will connect to with your approval. Once these steps are complete, just choose “PrivateLink” for the connection method in your Fivetran dashboard.

You can learn more about Fivetran’s support for Databricks and Private Link, along with a detailed setup guide, in our documentation.

Get started with private networking to Databricks

Private networking is available on Fivetran Business Critical, the leading cloud data integration solution for security, data privacy and regulatory compliance. It’s one of the many features and capabilities of our industry-leading data security and regulatory compliance. Learn more in our security white paper, or reach out to our sales team to get started.