As one of the world’s largest providers of content delivery network (CDN) and security solutions, Akamai owns thousands of data assets of various shapes and sizes, some even go up to multiple PBs. Several departments within the company leverage Databricks for their data and AI workloads, which means we have over a hundred Databricks workspaces within a single Databricks account, where some of the assets are shared across products, and some are product-specific.

In this presentation, we will describe how to use the capabilities of Unity Catalog to distribute the administration burden between departments, while still maintaining a unified governance model.

We will also share the benefits we’ve found in using Unity Catalog, beyond just access management, such as:

• Visibility into which data assets we have in the organization


• Ability to identify and potentially eliminate duplicate data workloads between departments


• Removing boilerplate code for accessing external sources


• Increasing innovation of product teams by exposing the data assets in a better, more efficient way