Kafka shouldn’t slow you down. Yet data duplication, manual, slow processes, and compliance roadblocks create unnecessary complexity. This release removes some of those bottlenecks, making it easier and faster to share data securely, automate governance, and ensure compliance—without friction.

With Partner Zones, teams can now grant partners controlled access to Kafka data in a few minutes and without duplication. Our Terraform provider automates security and governance, while crypto shredding brings a cost-effective way to ensure compliance by making sensitive data unreadable on demand. These innovations reinforce Conduktor’s mission: simplifying Kafka for your teams, minimizing risk, and turning real-time data into a competitive advantage.

Keep reading to see how these new capabilities help you break bottlenecks and speed up your Kafka operations.

Build Dedicated Zones to Share Data Securely with Partners in Under 60 Seconds

Traditionally, sharing streaming data externally meant duplicating Kafka topics across as many clusters as the number of partners we want to collaborate with—an expensive, complex to maintain, and resource-heavy process. 

At Conduktor, one of the core pillars driving our roadmap is to help organizations turn their real-time data into a competitive edge. That is, stop duplicating data and start monetizing it. Conduktor Exchange is exclusively focused on this. And now, with Partner Zones, teams can use an intuitive UI to build dedicated, isolated spaces where they can easily grant partners access to selected Kafka data streams—without replication or excessive cluster access.

With the new UI, you can create a Partner Zone to share data externally in under 60 seconds! It only takes a few steps:

1. Create a name for the Partner Zone, select a service account and the Conduktor proxy it’s going to connect.

2. Select the topics the partner will have access to, and the type of permission (read or write).

3. Define traffic control policies, configuring throughput and bandwidth parameters.

4. Now it’s ready to go! Share the new Partner Zone credentials with your partner.

Learn more in this blog post about this new capability included in Conduktor Exchange, or book a demo today to see how it can unlock new revenue streams for your organisation. 

Automate and Secure Your Data Streaming with Terraform

Managing Kafka at scale isn’t just about infrastructure—it’s about governance. Central teams need to control who can do what and that’s where Conduktor comes into play, enabling them to enforce security policies, and ensure compliance across multiple teams and environments. 

But our platform is used by teams in charge of some of the most complex Kafka deployments out there. They work in very demanding environments and need to be able to deploy and manage resources quickly and securely, using tools such as Terraform, the industry standard for infrastructure as code (IaC), to ensure repeatability and automation.

That’s why we’ve developed the Conduktor Terraform provider, making it easy to provision and enforce user and group access, policies, and security controls—with confidence and without slowing down development. Today you can set up and update Conduktor with connections to any Kafka cluster out of the box, reducing configuration drift whilst ensuring your user permissions are automatically updated in a timely manner.

Additionally you can now manage your Conduktor Self-service resources through Terraform, allowing you to grant autonomy to application teams by delegating topic creation with guardrails in place. This governance model brings ownership to topics and discoverability of data across the business through the topic catalog.

Crypto Shredding in Kafka: An Easy, Cost-Effective Way to Ensure Compliance

As data privacy regulations tighten and the volume of sensitive information in motion grows, organizations need a reliable way to comply with regulations like GDPR and be able to permanently erase personal data when required. However, traditional data deletion methods are slow, expensive, and often impractical in distributed systems like Kafka, where data is replicated across multiple nodes. 

Crypto shredding solves this by making encrypted data instantly and permanently unreadable—simply by deleting the associated encryption key. But this requires the implementation of per-user encryption, which can be very costly at scale (think about a bank with millions of users requiring millions of keys). Self-managed alternatives reduce costs but add complexity, security risks, and maintenance burdens. Without an efficient crypto shredding solution, businesses face compliance failures, legal penalties, and operational inefficiencies.

At Conduktor, we have been working with customers to explore a scalable, cost-effective crypto shredding solution built on Conduktor’s enterprise-grade encryption capabilities, that enables organizations to store user keys in Kafka and easily delete them when a deletion request is made, staying compliant, and maintaining full control over their data security strategy.

If you are looking for a more efficient way to comply with regulations and want to learn more about Conduktor’s approach, take a look at this recent blog post.