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While cloud computing is one of India's fastest-growing markets, demand for secure, scalable and cloud-agnostic data co-operation is just about at its peak. Chetan Urkudkar, Senior Staff Software Development Engineer at LiveRamp and IEEE Senior Member, is one who experienced it firsthand. With his work as an inventor of a patented product for confidential computing in data clean rooms and as a major contributor to cloud-agnostic platforms for Habu and LiveRamp behind him, his take is a rare view on where this industry is going.
2025 is going to become a year of high growth for India's market of data processing and digital services. The growth is already taking place, and it is indicated by recent declarations from various international players. For example, last January, Microsoft declared its intention to invest $3 billion in India in AI and Cloud infrastructure, followed by a similar statement from Amazon in March with the plan to invest $8.2 billion in constructing a data centre in Maharashtra state. These are just a few examples of quick expansion of India's data centre infrastructure, as it is now one of Asia's fastest-growing markets with more than a hundred already existing data centres and over eighty planned ones. Nevertheless, an acceleration of cloud adoption imposes challenges on developers and on businesses based on cloud assets in their everyday workflow. These challenges involve data fragmentation as businesses have to combine cloud solutions offered by various vendors.
The key to their success is a cloud-agnostic approach that creates new avenues for collaboration while providing companies with data control and secure data processing. With it, companies get to process their data without being dependent on one cloud provider, be it Google Cloud or Azure, seamlessly integrating disparate platforms and maintaining their data sovereignty. Chetan Urkudkar is one of the experts who makes that happen. The outstanding solutions he worked on, which are further described in the article in more detail, are utilized by various companies all over the globe, offering them secure computing access, greater flexibility with cloud storages and enhancing security and controls in general by enabling companies to decide on their data storage and processing locations.
Currently, handling big data effectively is an integral part of most areas of business processes ranging from personalizing customer experience to leveraging Predictive Analytics based on artificial intelligence to act proactively on a fluctuating market. But the performance of all these solutions is largely dependent on data quality. Therefore, an abundance of quality data is a competitive advantage, if not a subject matter for data partnerships and collaborative partnerships among businesses. As one of the fundamentals of partnerships in data is secure data exchange, infrastructure construction for data collaboration is important.This is where the expertise of people like Chetan Urkudkar becomes indispensable.
Over the course of his career, Chetan has led the development of innovative platforms that transform secure data collaboration. At Habu, his pioneering work in building cloud-agnostic designs—compatible with AWS, Azure, and others—broke new ground in terms of flexibility and control in IT systems. These platforms enable organizations to collaborate freely while maintaining the integrity and security of the data.
Through the development of such solutions Chetan has placed himself ahead of the pack in secure data exchange infrastructure. His technology provides a great benefit for organizations using it, opening doors to new opportunities for business development and competitive edge. Its successful growth is further illustrated by the fact that LiveRamp, where Chetan worked on confidential computing solutions as well, was awarded Google Cloud Partner of the Year in 2023.
As data collaboration becomes a cornerstone of modern business intelligence, allowing organizations to unlock insights from shared datasets while protecting privacy and ensuring regulatory compliance, which is illustrated by the fact that major cloud providers, such as Google Cloud and Azure, have launched or expanded their clean-room offerings within the recent years. Consequently, the role of the systems and tools providing such services becomes crucial for enterprise companies to operate efficiently and harness the potential of data analytics.
Chetan’s work at Habu, which is currently one of the leading providers of data collaboration and clean room solutions, with over a dozen offices across the world and established partnerships with top brands, centered on developing novel approaches for secure and effective data collaboration. With his work as a back-end engineer and an Improving IT Resilience Fellow, Chetan Urkudkar spearheaded building a cloud-agnostic clean room collaboration platform - a secure space that enables various organizations to collaborate and analyze data together without ever exposing or even moving it, regardless of their cloud provider choice. These types of spaces have many real-world applications and have a significant and increasing role to play in both commercial and public sectors.
To illustrate, a global consumer brand and an e-commerce platform can collaborate using clean room collaboration to collectively analyse campaign data and buying behavior without exposing raw data to one another and yet be able to cooperate while each firm’s privacy concerns remain intact.
At Habu, Chetan’s team achieved success in creating a secure data setting for analytics and machine learning deployments on AWS, GCP, and Azure. The solution enables organisations to maintain a rigorous zero-copy paradigm, whereby they analyse and distribute data without utilising it and therefore achieve seamless collaboration and retaining control over valuable data and keeping it safe from risk points like breaches and leaks.
Aside from custom implementations, Chetan has been a visionary leader in creating scalable, universal solutions that hold relevance beyond a single instance. His patent on confidential computing for data clean rooms underscores this leadership. This patent not only proves the strength of his technology but also highlights its versatility which allows it to be used across industries ranging from finance to healthcare wherever tight security and privacy of the data are of crucial importance. With these path-breaking developments, Chetan has been establishing industry standards and creating new frontiers for secure collaborative data.
The fact that Chetan Urkudjkar went a step further reveals that any innovation can never be of a merely technical nature: any successful implementation of innovations will always need a mindset shift or an approach of people toward resolving whatever task they face. Any innovation always has its human side, and noting this is one of the determiners of success. It is just this reason why he considers it a must to remain active within his pro community, exchanging ideas and experience with other professionals. Chetan Urkedkar was a recent jury board member of Globee Awards in Technology which was joined by dozens of participants coming from global places. In this respect, as a jury board member, he took part in determining the brightest and original ideas presented at this event. Apart from this, he also became an IEEE Senior Member, the largest technical professional organization of the world uniting the best engineers and tech professionals. In any team Chetan is a part of, he has one rule: he establishes a favorable environment and teaches and inspires people on how to use industry best practices and demonstrate strength of an innovation.
Soaring technological trends, especially the burst of AI and machine learning, amplify demands for safe, common working spaces with information intertwined with numerous different platforms. Chetan Urkudkar’s call for cloud-agnostic models puts organizations on a strategic high platform—delivering unmatched flexibility, improved collaboration, and sturdy protection against violations of security. His visionary design of clean room solutions provides organizations with infrastructure proof against any looming future, which resists well against onrushing challenges, yet opens avenues of fresh possibilities of domination over information. For organizations with a will toward shaping tomorrow’s digital universes, embracing these approaches is not just a preferable option, but a necessity.
