Inside Zaloni Arena: Enabling cross-team collaboration with connected data sharing

Nikhil Goel July 8th, 2020

Data sharing on a connected platform

Today’s companies have increasingly complex data environments with data that’s siloed within different systems and lines of business. As a result, data can be hard to find and access, wasting time and resources. Connected data sharing should be a priority.

Zaloni’s Arena platform provides an actionable and collaborative data catalog where all users within an enterprise can easily search for the relevant datasets, saving time and reducing the reliance on IT. 

One of the key aspects of an actionable data catalog is for a user to be able to connect to the data in a governed manner and perform actions like ingesting into a data lake, transforming the data to create refined datasets, and provisioning data to a sandbox environment. 

Arena provides a data sharing “Connections” feature that enables users to create different types of connections to the datasets such as JDBC, S3, ADLS, and others.

Users can also create connections with different privacy levels: private, public, and shared.

• Private connections are owned and accessible only by the user creating the connection.
• Public connections are accessible by any registered user in Arena.
• Shared connections are accessible by any users or projects with whom the connection is shared with.

Additionally, the owner of the connection can assign granularity of access and view and manage to the connections with public and shared scopes.

• View access enables a user to use a connection but not edit the connection metadata. 
• Manage access enables a user to edit the connection metadata and also allows for sharing the connection with other users and projects.

In a highly regulated, secured, and multi-tenant environment, data administrators and data owners often prefer creating only service and application accounts to data sources due to the overhead of managing individual user accounts. Connections sharing with users and projects help achieve this goal. 

Connections sharing reduces time to insight by allowing project administrators to pre-provisioning relevant data access using connections for a team or user. Centralizing the management of connection reduces any disruption of data access that might occur due to changes in connection configuration. 

The rest of this post will provide a walkthrough of the steps to enable cross-team connection sharing:  

Step 1 – Browse to Connection Listing

Step 2 – Create a new connection

Fill out the required information for the connection type. For an RDBMS connection type, JDBC URL, Drive Name, and User credentials are required to make a JDBC connection with the data source. 

Please note that connection can be made public, by unchecking the “Private” checkbox in the above form. Also, the user may optionally opt-out of storing credentials. By enabling “Store Credentials”, username and password are stored in an encrypted manner in Arena metastore so that the user does not have to provide credentials again when using the connection in the rest of the Arena application.

Step 3 – Share a connection

You can search for other registered Arena users and projects to share the connection with. For each user and/or project, you can select View or Manage access levels. This view will also display users and projects, with whom the connection was previously shared. To un-share, simply remove the user and/or project from the list. 

In conclusion, Arena helps enterprises to enable cross-team collaboration with connection sharing to access the right data at the right time to reduce time to insight. Contact us today if you’d like to learn more or get a custom demo! 

Watch Arena data sharing in action

Get a custom Arena demo today!

Arena is available now and is ready for deployment. It is currently available for Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and On-prem deployments. It can be deployed in bare metal, IaaS or Kubernetes environments. Please reach out to the Zaloni team to schedule a demo at zaloni.com/get-a-demo.

about the author

Nikhil Goel

Nikhil was a part of the Zaloni team as a data solutions architect then a seniro product manager. He now is Director of Product at Varo Bank.