Kraken is an operating system for utilities, licensing its platform to energy, water and telecom providers across 13 countries and supporting approximately 85 million contracted accounts globally. As the company scaled in highly regulated markets, it needed stronger governance, compliance and secure data sharing across a complex multi-account architecture. With Databricks Unity Catalog and Delta Sharing, Kraken can deliver data to clients in a safe, compliant and timely way while maintaining visibility and control across its platform.
Scaling data in a regulated world
With data at the heart of everything Kraken does, the company approaches it from two angles: helping clients use data for analytics and operational reporting, and using data internally to understand the business and support AI-driven processes. A data team of roughly 70 to 85 people spanning data engineering, analytics engineering, infrastructure and delivery supports those efforts.
As Kraken grew, operating in heavily regulated markets introduced increasingly complex governance challenges. In the early days, with only a handful of engineers, tracking who had access to what data was manageable. But as the company scaled, that informal approach was no longer sufficient. Kraken needed to enforce strict access controls, maintain auditability and demonstrate compliance with regulations like GDPR and SOC 1 and 2 — all while managing an architecture in which each client operates within its own dedicated Databricks account. "We are extremely careful about what data lives in our cloud and how we protect it," said Javi Asensio, Head of Data and Analytics Engineering at Kraken. "Governance and auditability were something we were very interested in from the start."
As a system of record for utility providers, Kraken handles sensitive personal and financial data on behalf of clients, many of whom are publicly listed companies with strict compliance requirements. Cost visibility added further pressure. During the energy crisis, with infrastructure spending under scrutiny, Kraken needed to justify every dollar spent. "When the CEO comes to me and says you're spending a lot of money, I need to be able to justify why," Asensio said. "I need the visibility to say we spent this amount of money to grow this part of the business and here's the value it created."
Without a unified governance layer, it was difficult to consistently monitor access, usage and accountability across dozens of accounts.
A unified governance layer for a complex, multi-account world
To address these challenges, Kraken migrated to Unity Catalog, adopting it early and building its governance framework around its core capabilities. System tables give Kraken visibility into data access, query history and active endpoints across accounts. Because Kraken maintains a separate Databricks account for each client, system tables and the Unity Catalog API together cover roughly 95% of its governance needs without requiring third-party tools that would be difficult to operate across dozens of isolated environments. "Most of the stuff we need to do can come from system tables, and the rest from the API," Asensio said. "That enables us not to depend on third parties, which is very difficult given the architecture that we have."
Security is organized around a clear principle: no one should have access to data they do not need. Kraken enforces this across three pillars — client data isolation through account separation, access controls around personal data for GDPR compliance and controls around financial data for SOC 1 and 2 compliance. Kraken implements data masking and fine-grained access controls to support a sensitive requirement from Essential Energy, an Australian electricity distributor. In that use case, Kraken protects energy consumption data for anyone outside Australia, including Kraken engineers, across three tables containing billions of rows of smart meter readings. "Not even our employees are allowed to see that data unless they live in Australia," Asensio said. "Even though I run the infrastructure and the team, I am not allowed to see it."
Delta Sharing has become another critical component of how Kraken delivers value to clients. For clients on less mature platforms, configuring data sharing during onboarding can take up to a week and a half. For clients on Databricks, Delta Sharing reduces that to a single day. Kraken standardizes on Delta tables internally, converting to Iceberg only when clients on platforms like Snowflake or Fabric require it. Looking ahead, Kraken plans to expand its use of Unity Catalog, including attribute-based access controls and govern tags, to automate tagging of personal data across its entire data estate, both for internal compliance and to help clients apply better governance on their end.
Delivering data safely in a high-stakes industry
With Unity Catalog at the center of its data platform, Kraken has built a governance foundation that scales with the business's complexity. Kraken can now enforce fine-grained access controls, track data usage across accounts, and demonstrate compliance to clients and regulators, all from a unified layer that requires no third-party tooling.
By leveraging Delta Sharing, Kraken reduced the time to make data available to new Databricks clients from up to a week and a half down to a single day, an important improvement given that data availability is the first milestone in an onboarding process that can span 12 to 18 months. System tables, meanwhile, give Kraken's leadership clear visibility into how Databricks resources are consumed across the organization, enabling them to link infrastructure spending directly to business outcomes.
Ultimately, Unity Catalog has enabled Kraken to meet the trust placed in it by some of the world's most scrutinized utility providers, from masking billions of rows of sensitive smart meter data to ensuring GDPR-compliant handling of personal data across 13 countries. "Unity Catalog allows us to deliver data in the safest and most compliant way for our customers," Asensio said. "Given the liability involved, that is not something we take lightly."