Organizations need to share data outside their infrastructure when collaborating with partners, this can present unqiue challenges compared to working within your business. We've seen this in action where customers want to work with: marketing agencies for audience building, sharing real-time updates with the rest of the supply chain, financial institutions running speedy checks with credit agencies, or providing auditing information with regulators.

The challenges sharing data

To make this happen, no security team is going to be thrilled about connecting partners directly to your internal Kafka, but what if sharing your real-time data with your partners is exactly what you need to do?

You're now faced with additional challenges and responsibilites on top of your existing workloads!

What we've seen our customers struggle with is:

• Managing & maintaining an additional Kafka cluster with all it's associated costs, just for partners

• Replicating data from your internal cluster to the partner cluster, blurring the source of truth

• The secure encryption and decryption of data for sharing

• Identifying and auditing partner applications. Determining who they are and what they're doing

• Abstracting internal details away, prevent sharing of naming conventions or other private internal metadata

Today we observe challenges when attempting to replicate data to an externally accessible cluster. See below the typical internal company Kafka cluster, a dedicated isolated space a.k.a demilitarized zone (DMZ) to host an additional external Kafka cluster, and a replication stack required to move data between the two:

How Conduktor helps

Kafka isn't sufficient to overcome these challenges today. Conduktor helps by creating a safe zone separated from your core infrastructure which partners connect to instead of your Kafka cluster.

How we've helped our customers:

• Remove the need for data replication entirely. Conduktor forwards requests between partners and the Kafka cluster to produce/consume

• Encrypt all data to required standards passing in and out of your org, through Conduktor, a common, simple setup. No changes required by application teams

• Isolate each partner in it's own tenant, ensuring they only see the topics they're meant to. Map internal topics to share with a single API call

• Clearly identify which partner is sending or receiving data by tagging messages consumed or produced

Now they don't need to replicate anything with partners connecting to Conduktor within the DMZ. We now have the existing internal Kafka cluster, with Conduktor sitting in the DMZ to recieve requests from partner clients to produce & consume to the internal Kafka cluster, whilst adding any & all the benefits available!

Feeling this pain? Come see how we help businesses such as yours with problems like this and so much more. Book a demo.

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