Ockam and Redpanda Partner to Enhance Streaming Data Security

SAN FRANCISCO, May 31, 2024 — Today, Ockam teamed up with Redpanda to launch Redpanda Connect with Ockam, the first zero-trust streaming data platform. This is a natural partnership because both companies have the same ethos: to enable every developer to build distributed systems, at scale, with simple tools. Both companies’ products are based on popular open source projects and are built by veteran, high-performing teams.

“Enterprise executives tell me that their high value streaming applications take a long time to build and to ship,” said Matthew Gregory, Ockam’s CEO. “Their biggest obstacle is the construction of secure streaming data connections across their siloed enterprise, and between partner companies. Secure data streaming is now simple to set up, trivial to maintain, and almost impossible to mess up. We’ve unlocked data so application development can move fast.”

Enterprise Kafka product vendors defer zero-trust implementation details to their customers. It is difficult, even for sophisticated engineering organizations, to pull together a team that can choose and assemble the dozens of parts required to build a secure-by-design streaming data platform. Redpanda Connect with Ockam empowers a single developer to easily create end-to-end encrypted streaming pipelines that can connect 100’s of applications across clouds and hybrid infrastructure. It builds trust in data streams, eliminates sources of risk to critical data, and removes the operational complexities inherent in managing keys at scale.

Redpanda provides a declarative streaming data service that enables developers and organizations to build simple, chained, and stateless processing steps for their data pipelines. Our partnership with Redpanda brings a truly zero-trust capability to these pipelines. Ockam’s cryptographic protocols and data integrity guarantees remove the risk of MITM and supply-chain attacks that could otherwise tamper with data inflight and lead to data poisoning; highlighted as one of the OWASP Top 10 risks for companies that leverage AI and Large Language Model (LLM) systems. The mutual authentication and encrypted data protocols that Ockam provides also mean organizations can transmit highly sensitive data with cryptographic guarantees so only the intended recipients will be able to decrypt and process it. This will unlock new high value applications that businesses may have been unwilling to explore due to privacy and governance risk, or complexity.

“We help the world’s largest companies build and scale streaming applications,” said Alex Gallego, Redpanda’s CEO. “Redpanda Connect with Ockam was conceived to empower our customers to build streaming data applications with ease. Redpanda Connect comes with over 200 pre-built integrations that will quickly connect to and unlock your data silos. Ockam provides the mutual authentication and end-to-end encryption that zero-trust streaming data applications require. Together with Ockam, we’ve abstracted away all of the complex pieces that cause engineering teams to stumble.”

Confluent’s “2023 Data Streaming Report: Moving Up the Maturity Curve” recently surveyed 2,250 IT and engineering leaders from organizations that use streaming data.

• 74% cited that their streaming data applications are blocked because of fragmented projects, uncoordinated teams, and constrained engineering budgets.
• 32% claim that they successfully “reduced security risks” after implementing data streaming services across their applications. However, 94% have high-security expectations for these same applications.

Despite the obvious benefits that a real-time streaming data architecture provides, companies struggle to ship data pipelines to their applications. Often, they are blocked for several quarters. Once they get to production, they realize that their data does not have the security guarantees that they need or expect from their streaming data infrastructure.

Redpanda Connect with Ockam aims to move these numbers to 0% and 100%, respectively.

About Redpanda

Redpanda is the streaming data platform for developers. API-compatible with Apache Kafka, Redpanda introduces a breakthrough architecture and disruptive capabilities that make it an easy, fast, scalable, and cost-effective engine of record for both real-time and historical enterprise data. Innovators like Lacework, Jump Trading, Vodafone, Moody’s, Hotels Network and Alpaca rely on Redpanda to process hundreds of terabytes of data a day. Backed by premier venture investors Lightspeed, GV and Haystack VC, Redpanda is a diverse, people-first organization with teams distributed around the globe.

About Ockam

Ockam is simple. There are three things you need to know: First, Ockam enables developers to build trust between every application, database, SaaS service, code repo, data lake, AI Engine, container, and microservice… everywhere, in any network. Second, Ockam is networkless. Ockam enables IT teams to skip the pain of system administration, IP Backlogs, Allow Lists, VPNs, firewalls, reverse proxies, setting up public endpoints, creating public APIs, and key administration. And third, Ockam is secure-by-design. It is open-source, audited and built in rust. It does the encryption, authentication, key generation, rotation, revocation, and a lot more. For more information, please visit www.ockam.io.

Source: Ockam