Data Governance with Unity Catalog on Databricks

Chapter 10. Being Compliant with Regulatory Standards

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.

Alfred North Whitehead

Nexa Boutique, being a business-to-consumer (B2C) company, collects and stores users’ data. When Nexa expanded to Europe, it was in for a surprise. It’s well-known that data privacy laws in Europe and the UK are relatively strict; however, what organizations outside of Europe usually fail to understand is that the general public in Europe really cares about their privacy. They are very cautious about sharing their information with others, especially digitally. Karthik has been living in Germany for more than a decade, and he has seen the stark difference between Germany’s approach to data privacy in comparison to other countries such as India and the US. The reasons are rooted in historical experiences, cultural values emphasizing human dignity, and a robust rights-based legal framework.

We have observed that engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and anyone owning or running a business do not tend to like regulatory standards and compliance requirements. These standards and requirements often make it harder for businesses to operate and cost them significant time and effort, and noncompliance is not an option. This indeed hinders innovation and blocks companies from progressing faster. Data scientists or ML engineers having unrestricted access to all sorts of datasets are able to build well-performing models in ...