Confluent Enables Enterprises to Build a Secure Shared Services Platform for Data Streaming to Maximize Cost Efficiency

Confluent, Inc., the data streaming pioneer, announced new Confluent Cloud capabilities that help organizations easily build a secure shared services platform for data streaming. The shared services architectural model allows for efficient, cost-effective use of cloud infrastructure resources, which is especially important as businesses’ budgets tighten and new competitors constantly emerge. With Confluent’s newly added OAuth support, Cloud Client Quotas, and expanded Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC), businesses can unlock more real-time innovation and widespread access to data streaming without worrying about degrading application performance, increasing costs, or introducing new operational burdens.

“This year, many businesses are in a tough spot where resources are tight, but expectations for real-time experiences and operations remain high,” said Shaun Clowes, Chief Product Officer at Confluent. “This release helps organizations connect and stream data from across their business in the most cost-effective and safest way possible. A secure, shared services platform for data streaming saves valuable time and resources while ensuring data and applications are safe and easily accessible across clouds.”

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“Security is a first-class citizen on our platform and is included in every feature we release,” said Jonathan Kropp, Director of Architecture at Extend. “The combination of Confluent’s OAuth and access controls allow us to grant the least amount of access needed for each feature to do its job. This batteries-included approach to authentication and authorization has made securing Kafka simple and straightforward, allowing us to focus on building highly scalable distributed systems.”

With the current market environment, organizations are looking to minimize costs and reduce infrastructure spending. Yet, businesses often manage hundreds of applications spread across different business units and teams, making it extremely difficult to keep operating expenses under control. Typically, each application requires dedicated resources and tuning to maintain expected performance levels. In addition, identity and access management across large numbers of individuals and applications is a substantial operational burden. Teams often need to manage identity credentials across several vendors and manually ensure that they are always in sync to provide a seamless user experience.

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“Businesses are looking for ways to efficiently run all of their applications side-by-side to help overcome rising infrastructure costs and operational burdens, and a shared services model has become essential for large businesses to scale their data platforms in a cost-effective way,” said Amy Machado, Research Manager, Data Streaming Pipeline at IDC. “Confluent bundling of their Client Quotas, OAuth support, and expanded Role-Based Access Controls capabilities provides enterprise-level security across services and individuals, delivering a path for organizations to expand data streaming adoption in a safe, secure, and cost-effective manner.”

A shared services model enables organizations to run multiple applications on one cluster, saving infrastructure costs and simplifying operations. With this release, Confluent Cloud makes implementing this model easier with seamless identity management integrations, stronger access controls, and precise resource utilization controls for an enterprise-wide, multi-tenant implementation. These new shared services capabilities help to run apps at the same time and cut infrastructure and authentication resource needs.

New capabilities include:

• Support for OAuth reduces the operational burden of scaling workloads with centralized identity management:
  With OAuth, a cloud-native authentication standard, organizations can quickly integrate and protect their applications with third-party identity providers to efficiently scale workloads and reduce operational burdens. Using OAuth, organizations can manage application identities through their own identity provider seamlessly across multiple clouds, saving valuable time and effort through automation. In addition, businesses can enhance their security by using time-sensitive tokens for authentication needs.
• New Client Quotas protect individual application performance with cloud-native resource utilization controls for a multi-tenant deployment:
  Using Cloud Client Quotas in Confluent Cloud, enterprises can now easily build and manage a multi-tenant, shared services data streaming platform in the cloud, delivering enterprise-wide access to Apache Kafka while reducing operational complexity and cost. Available on Dedicated clusters with support for up to 20 GBps overall throughput, this new feature enables precise side-by-side application performance with individually curated throughput controls and monitoring for every workload. Working on the same internally shared cluster, teams can now access and reuse high-quality data to accelerate data streaming innovation.
• Enhanced RBAC is now available for all Confluent Cloud resources to ensure compliance, confidentiality, and privacy at scale:
  With expanded Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to Schema Registry, Connect, and ksqlDB, customers can set granular permissions for users with a click of a button. By centrally managing and moderating all users and applications, RBAC allows architects, operators, and developers to be onboarded to the platform faster. Enforced permissions across all cloud resources ensure complete data protection and privacy.

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