Cloudflare and Databricks join forces to simplify and cut costs of cloud data sharing

Cloudflare, a prominent security and reliability company, has recently partnered with Databricks, an AI and data company, to simplify and reduce the cost of sharing data across various cloud platforms. This collaboration aims to empower organizations to collaborate and share live data in a safe, straightforward, and affordable manner. By leveraging the capabilities of Cloudflare and Databricks, joint customers can overcome the complexities and dynamic expenses that hinder the full potential of multi-cloud analytics and AI initiatives.

According to Matei Zaharia, the Co-Founder and CTO at Databricks, the absence of an open standard for secure data exchange across organizations has made collaboration a time-consuming process. The current approach involves exporting, replicating, and maintaining data across multiple software platforms, which adds unnecessary complexity. To address this challenge, Databricks has introduced Delta Sharing, an open protocol for sharing data across diverse computing platforms, clouds, and regions. The partnership with Cloudflare further underscores the industry’s demand for this solution, as it strengthens the ecosystem and facilitates seamless collaboration among customers.

Databricks is driven by its mission to help data teams tackle the world’s toughest problems, and enabling secure data sharing and collaboration plays a crucial role in achieving that objective. However, many organizations still struggle to share data effectively across different clouds, customers, teams, and partners. They often rely on restrictive platforms that come with maintenance burdens, high egress costs, and security limitations. This situation is particularly costly for organizations utilizing AI, as they constantly move massive training data sets across different clouds in search of optimal GPU resources, resulting in significant egress fees. Delta Sharing, as the industry’s first open protocol for secure data sharing, simplifies the process of sharing data across teams and organizations, irrespective of their chosen computing platforms.

With the integration of Cloudflare’s zero egress, distributed object storage offering called R2, Databricks will now support Delta Sharing. This seamless integration empowers data teams to easily and efficiently share live data sets in R2, eliminating the need for complex data transfers or duplications while avoiding egress fees. Consequently, joint customers can ensure that they share the most up-to-date data sets with their partners, suppliers, and lines of business without compromising security, privacy, or facing unexpected egress costs.

Matthew Prince, the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, emphasized that we are currently experiencing an AI revolution driven by data. He stated that R2 provides an excellent proposition for companies seeking to avoid vendor lock-in and retain the flexibility to choose where and how to use their data.

By combining Cloudflare’s extensive global network and zero egress storage capabilities with Databricks’ powerful sharing and processing features, joint customers can benefit from the fastest, most secure, and cost-effective data sharing capabilities worldwide.