Secure Data Collaboration at Scale with Databricks Clean Rooms

The data sharing dilemma: Innovation vs. Privacy

If you're working with data today, you already know the trade-off: real insights often require collaboration, but collaboration risks exposing sensitive information. Whether you're partnering with vendors, researchers, or other business units, accessing shared datasets is tricky business.

It’s not just about regulations like GDPR or CCPA, although those are non-negotiable, it’s also about the real risk of breaches and data misuse. And let’s face it, copying and sending sensitive data around just doesn’t cut it anymore.

So, how do you collaborate effectively without compromising privacy?

That’s where Databricks Clean Rooms come in. They offer a new way to work together on data without losing control of it.

So, what is a Databricks Clean Room?

Think of a Databricks Clean Room as a secure, neutral zone where multiple parties can analyse data together, but no one actually shares their raw data.

It’s built on the Databricks Lakehouse Platform, which means it brings along two powerful tools:

• Unity Catalog, which gives you centralised control and audibility for all your data assets.

  
  

• Delta Sharing, an open protocol that lets you share data securely without copying it from system to system.

  
  

When you set up a Clean Room, Databricks creates a temporary, isolated workspace, a “central clean room.” Each participant shares their data only with this space. You're not sharing with each other directly, and no one can see raw rows of someone else's dataset. You just see enough metadata (like column names) to write meaningful, approved queries.

How does it work with privacy built in

Databricks Clean Rooms are not just locked down. They’re designed to protect privacy from the ground up. Here's what that looks like:

• You never see raw data. All queries happen inside the Clean Room, and only pre-approved logic runs.

  
  

• Everyone has equal control. There's no data owner pulling the strings. If one person wants to update a query, everyone else has to approve it.

  
  

• You can’t sneak data out. Serverless egress control means outbound network access is restricted. So even if you tried, you couldn’t slip data into an external system.

  
  

• Temporary outputs only. Outputs live in short-lived tables within the clean room. You get what you need for your workflow, and that’s it.

  
  

• It’s all tracked. Every action is logged, audited, and available for compliance reviews. Nothing happens in the dark.

Supercharge clean rooms with synthetic data

While Clean Rooms are a solid foundation, they get even more powerful when you layer in privacy-enhancing technologies like synthetic data.

Here’s how that works:

• Faster access: Synthetic datasets can help you bypass long legal reviews by generating data that behaves like the real thing, without the risk.

  
  

• More detailed insights: You can safely explore data at the row level without compromising actual records.

  
  

• Dynamic generation: Rather than sharing a static dataset, you can provide a privacy-safe generative AI model inside the Clean Room. This lets your collaborators create synthetic data on the fly, tailored to their analysis.

  
  

It’s like giving someone a simulator instead of handing them the keys to your production car.

Final thoughts: privacy and innovation can coexist

Databricks Clean Rooms are changing how organisations collaborate. They provide a controlled, transparent way to unlock insights from shared data while keeping that data secure.

By adding synthetic data to the mix, you go beyond just protecting privacy. You enable faster collaboration, deeper insights, and a more flexible way to work with data. This isn’t just a compliance play. It’s a way to innovate with confidence in a world where trust and transparency matter more than ever.

If your organisation is balancing the need for innovation with regulatory and reputational risk, Databricks Clean Rooms can help.

As a Databricks partner, we’ve helped teams across industries enable safe, scalable data collaboration. Let’s explore how we can do the same for you.