Krishnakumar Sivasubramanian

In this session, NFCU and EY share how implementing Unity Catalog as the central access point for data assets within the Enterprise Data Lake (EDL) delivered millions in savings, 40% faster development and 50% lower runtime. By redesigning their ETL framework and establishing a single, trusted access point for data, NFCU improved speed, reduced cost, and strengthened governance—without slowing innovation. We will unpack the architecture and the strategic use of access control in UC and provide actionable insights and best practices for leveraging Unity Catalog to drive measurable improvements in data management efficiency and effectiveness.

Navy Federal Credit Union has 200+ enterprise data sources in the enterprise data lake. These data assets are used for training 100+ machine learning models and hydrating a semantic layer for serving, at an average 4,000 business users daily across the credit union. The only option for extracting data from analytic semantic layer was to allow consuming application to access it via an already-overloaded cloud data warehouse. Visualizing data lineage for 1,000 + data pipelines and associated metadata is impossible and understanding the granular cost for running data pipelines is a challenge. Implementing Unity Catalog opened alternate path for accessing analytic semantic data from lake. It also opened the doors to remove duplicate data assets stored across multiple lakes which will save hundred thousands of dollars in data engineering efforts, compute and storage costs.