Databricks, a data and AI platform, has acquired Okera, a data governance platform with a focus on AI. The two companies did not disclose the acquisition price. The purpose of the integration is to provide the Databricks platform with more AI functionality and to help companies protect the security and privacy of their data. Okera has developed a new isolation technology that can support arbitrary workloads while enforcing governance control without sacrificing performance. The plan is to integrate Okera’s AI-centric governance technologies into the Unity Catalog, Databricks’ data governance layer for all data and AI workloads. With this acquisition, Databricks aims to provide customers with an intuitive, AI-powered interface to automatically discover, classify, and tag sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII).
