Confluent delivers enhanced data privacy, opens new opportunities with Azure Private Link

Data moves. It goes from place to place and people to people, from task to task and transaction to transaction. It changes, accelerates, grows, and takes on more meaning. And it can spark more insight—if you can grab it while it whizzes by. 

Increasingly, the evolution and ongoing success of a business depends on its ability to develop data-fed operations and deliver data-backed experiences to its customers and employees. Confluent helps its customers capture data in motion and integrate it into business operations. It helps them unlock the value of information by surfacing and harnessing data insights directly and in real time.

For many organizations, operationalizing data at this level would require significant infrastructure expansion, but Confluent does that work for them by delivering a fully managed, cloud data-in-motion software as a service (SaaS) platform, built on Apache Kafka and more securely and optimally accessed with Microsoft Azure Private Link.

The power of privacy

Confluent offers a unified, high-throughput, low-latency framework for real-time data-feed streaming that is cloud native and available almost anywhere. Through a comprehensive SaaS platform with multiple capabilities—like security, networking, and governance—Confluent provides full access to technology that links and syncs data across environments and enables extensive scale easily and cost-effectively. 

Confluent delivers its SaaS platform with Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Virtual Machines, so when customers connect to Confluent, they never need to think about the architecture that supports it. To provide the value of cloud-backed, real-time data for risk-averse customers, particularly those in highly regulated industries or with other increased security requirements, Confluent uses Azure Private Link to help maintain the privacy and integrity of any customer’s digital network. It chose Private Link to help minimize the complexity of connecting virtual networks in the public cloud and simplify highly secure connectivity for all types of customers.

Although it supports bidirectional peering, Confluent recommends Private Link to establish unidirectional connections to help keep customers’ networks private and protected. With Private Link, Confluent provides a better, more seamless customer experience. Customers simply consume Confluent as a service in Azure, over Private Link, from inside the customer virtual network. By circumventing unique IP address allocation issues that emerge from conventional virtual network peering, Private Link frees up customer IT teams from having to coordinate with Confluent on IP address challenges, while keeping all details about a customer’s network private. In fact, with Private Link, customers can connect their network to Confluent without coupling IP addresses or VNet routing.

“Peering requires us to be deeply integrated with a customer's network, which poses a challenge for adoption and operations due to the lack of decoupling, and separation concerns,” says Sunil Patil, Group Product Manager at Confluent. “With Azure Private Link, we can provide full access without being coupled to the customer’s network.” 

Better service, enhanced privacy, new opportunities

By supporting its platform on Azure, Confluent brings the power of real-time data streaming to organizations without the exorbitant costs and technical challenges of in-house solutions. Some customers need or want private connectivity from a virtual network to access Confluent’s SaaS offerings, and Confluent addresses this need by using Private Link to simplify customer architectures and connectivity in Azure while helping to eliminate the risk of data exfiltration. 

“With Azure and Azure Private Link, we help our customers gain the benefits of the advanced technology their business demands,” says Greg Murphy, Product Marketing Manager at Confluent. “At the same time, we help them avoid the challenges and costs of implementation and management.” 

For customers, this amounts to a significant savings in both cost and time. Confluent reduces customer technology costs by up to 60 percent, and by delivering Confluent over Private Link, Confluent can offer that tremendous value for customers who need a highly secured and managed cloud-backed data streaming connection. Customers already using Confluent have also seen additional use cases on the platform for their own secured network requirements. 

“With Azure Private Link, we can support both new and existing customers with secured networking requirements,” says Murphy. “It offers the potential for expansion within our existing customer base, and the chance to land net-new customers with security requirements across the board.”  

Phenomenal growth, more innovation

Confluent has already seen evidence of its choice in Private Link contributing to the company’s continued growth. "With our cloud business growing 175 percent year over year,” reports Patil, “it's critical that our growing customer base has trust in our cloud service, and Azure Private Link gives our customers that trust.”

As Confluent grows and reaches across different industries, it will need to support more types of customers with more highly regulated or other risk-averse use cases. “More and more, strict privacy, security, and compliance requirements are not an edge case but a box that we need to check off,” says Murphy. “With Azure Private Link, we meet the needs of any customer account, and it helps us get their workloads onto our platform.”

For Confluent, this translates to good business, but also to improved reliability and increased time to focus on its innovative services. By reducing development, deployment, and maintenance friction, Confluent has freed its engineers to focus their time and capacity on developing new features and on offering new value to customers. 

“We’ve used Azure Private Link to reduce, remove, or eliminate a lot of customer deployment and management challenges,” says Patil. “We’ve saved time, increased our productivity, and opened up new go-to-market opportunities.” 

Find out more about Confluent on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn.