The Hidden Cost of Databricks Freedom: Balancing Innovation with Governance

When teams first adopt Databricks, they typically start with a "yes to everything" approach. Data scientists get full access to explore, experiment, and innovate. This works well— until it doesn't. Three of the most common scenarios we see:

• Data usage becomes untraceable
• Compliance requirements get overlooked
• Security policies become hard to enforce

Even with the Unity Catalog, organizations struggle to answer basic questions.. Who is using what data? Why are they using it (for which project?) Are they following our organisation's compliance rules?

There is a real cost to governance failures, it's not only about a box left unchecked. It's seen in valuable time spent tracking down data usage, in the increased risk of violations that can trigger serious penalties, in  security vulnerabilities and, maybe most frustratingly for those involved, in duplicate (or often triplicate, quadruplicate or more) work across teams.

Building Effective Governance in Databricks

The first impulse is to fully restrict access, and this would be the easiest for one side - the compliance side. But it's not feasible. Effective governance is that which effectively supports the business, not hinders it. So we need to try to make governance part of the natural workflow of companies. And there are multiple ways in which we can adapt  Databricks governance strategies to make them work for both sides.

1. Clear Data Ownership in Databricks

Data ownership often becomes unclear as teams grow and projects multiply. So successful organizations address this by establishing clear ownership patterns early on. They define not just who owns each dataset, but also how that ownership translates into practical responsibilities.

For example, we can assign dataset owners based on business domains rather than technical teams. These owners become responsible for defining usage policies and approving access requests. More importantly, they track how their data is being used across different projects, ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements while maintaining team agility.

2. Self-Service Governance in Databricks

Traditional access management often creates bottlenecks, with IT teams becoming overwhelmed by access requests. Modern governance approaches attempt to solve this by looking at embedding access controls into the daily workflow of data teams.

A practical implementation could look like this:

• Structure data access per data product output
• Self-service interface for access requests
• Automate workflows routing requests to appropriate approvers
• Regular data access reviews

This approach typically reduces access request processing time from months or weeks to hour or minutes, while again - maintaining strict compliance standards.

3. Automated compliance tracking in Databricks

Manual compliance tracking doesn't scale. No manual process ever does. So organizations successful with Databricks governance look at automating compliance processes. Reducing the need for manual input drastically reduces friction between teams and can improve the adoption of any process. Automating in this case can mean:

• Automatically logging all data access requests
• Tracking data lineage across all projects
• Generating compliance reports automatically
• Setting up automated alerts for potential policy violations

We could imagine how implementing these can lead to significantly less time spent on routine checks and to increased focus on strategic governance improvements.

Having Our Cake And Eating It Too : Innovation PLUS Governance

It's worth repeating the key to successful governance here - it's  finding the right balance between control and flexibility. This flexibility is vital to maintain innvation and ensure a healthy growth. Organizations that get this right understand that they need to give data scientists freedom but also that they need to do it within defined boundaries. This can be achieved by looking at automating routine governance tracks, effectively making compliance the path of least resistance, and enabling quick access to approved data sources, which is what data scientists often struggle the most with.

We often talk to Data Leaders that struggle with effective governance and understand that things aren't on the right track but aren't sure where to look at. So it's important to first clearly understand the specifics of our current setup. Do we know who's using our critical data? Can teams easily request and get access to data? Are we meeting compliance requirements without manual work?

If we find ourselves answering "no" to any of these, it might be time to rethink our approach to Databricks governance.

Start with an honest mapping of the data landscape to identify critical datasets, document current usage patterns and list compliance requirements. Once there's a clear and shared understanding of the actual data landscape and the requirements of all business functions, move to implementing self-service governance:

• Teams request access through a simple interface
• Approvals follow predefined rules
• Usage and requests are tracked automatically

Data scientists get to keep their flexibility, compliance teams get their oversight and everyone saves time.

The Path Forward: Bring Self-Service Governance To Databricks

We've seen this scenario play out often at customers so we've built a tool to help solve these problems. The Data Product Portal is a fully open-source project and free to use. It lets you continue using your preferred data science and analytics tools like Databricks, while offering self-service automated governance. It's best suited for data teams within businesses that aim to build their own use cases in a self-service way, embracing data product thinking.

So imagine this: two teams, each with four data scientists. Team A is building a demand forecasting model and Team B is developing a pricing optimization system.

Team B needs Team A's forecast outputs. Their options are:

• Request access to Team A's entire workspace (security risk)
• Have Team A manually export and share results (time-consuming)
• Create duplicate data pipelines (inefficient and error-prone)

They risk spending more time solving access issues than improving their models.

When using Portal, the organisation enables Team B to access only the specific forecast outputs they need, see the data lineage (where the data comes from) and get automated access to updates. One of the biggest benefits to working within a data product framework is that it makes accessing the latest version of the data product output the default modus operandi. Meanwhile, Portal empowers Team A to maintain control of their workspace while sharing only the necessary outputs, track who uses their data and automate access management.

In a nutshell, the key point we want to make is that effective Databricks governance doesn't mean choosing between innovation and control. It means making governance simple enough that teams want to follow it by automating the boring parts and reducing friction through self-service capabilities.

Check out the project's repo for more details, reach out to us anytime on our Slack channnel or book a guided demo,  we'd love to show you around.