Secure Infrastructure For Innovation: Chetan Urkudkar Explains The Role Of Clean Rooms For The Future Of Digital Economy

India's digital economy is experiencing a period of rapid growth. India is likely to cross 900 million internet users by 2025, and more than 55% of this growth is occurring in rural India. Additionally, the Indian tech startup ecosystem received a 23% boost in funding and reached a size of $7.4 billion by 2024. With this growth comes heightened considerations for protecting consumer data privacy.

Chetan Urkudkar, a member of IEEE and a Senior Staff Software Development Engineer, has real-life experience in building secure solutions in a changing market, as he spearheaded several successful projects in data processing and data collaboration. As the sector expands,he provided his distinct view on the industry's current state and how to drive innovation that keeps privacy at its core.

You have been involved in secure infrastructure development for over a decade, ranging from HRIS development to designing clean-room solutions. In your experience working on a hands-on level, how do you see India's digital economy's growth so quickly as having impacted data privacy as well as infrastructure? In your view, what do you see as the best challenges and opportunities created by this growth?

Privacy laws have been expanding globally since the passing of GDPR in Europe in 2018.On top of having to address previously accrued issues but this time on a massive scale, Indian companies have a new set of issues to face, and among them is a growing demand for increased measures on privacy.

In addition to compliance with the DPDP act signed into legislation in 2023, companies have to face client-initiated issues as more and more people care about how companies treat their data. Privacy laws are evolving rapidly and have created complexity for those trying to follow the space.

Therefore companies in India's digital economy must ensure they're upholding data policies that not only follow the legislation in place today, but can evolve with the additional privacy legislation that will inevitably be enacted in the future. This requires building secure solutions that offer flexible controls. 

You have worked on confidential computing solutions, including your patented clean-room architecture, long before they became a mainstream necessity. From your perspective, how has the mindset around secure data collaboration shifted over the years? And how has your work contributed to wider adoption of these solutions?

Data privacy is no longer a niche concern but a baseline business requirement. Consumers' increased awareness of how their data is used led to the introduction of new regulations. My career journey was naturally aligned with this shift, as my interest in secure collaboration began years ago when I was working on complex data integration and processing platforms at Saba Software and later at Habu and now Liveramp.

From the very beginning, I recognized the importance of confidential computing and its growing significance for the future and focused my efforts on researching the area and developing solutions that not only solve existing challenges but also provide a reliable foundation for future growth.

You mentioned working at Habu and LiveRamp, having led multiple high-impact projects there, such as solutions deployed by hundreds of users and acknowledged by leading cloud vendors. What were your objectives in these projects and how did you accomplish them? 

At Habu, I managed a team working on a cloud-agnostic clean-room collaboration tool that allowed collaboration in multiple-provider cloud environments, like AWS, GCP, and Azure. Our target was to build a solution centered on interoperability, scalability, and collaboration on data, meaning, in other words, creating a tool that makes sure our customers can collaborate and share information securely and effectively and do not have to rely on a single provider of cloud services. It's a required component of effective work for a considerable number of firms today.

Secure collaboration achieved through clean rooms becomes especially important in industries that involve working with sensitive data, such as healthcare or finance. Clean rooms allow multiple parties, including government agencies and commercial organisations, to collaborate and gain valuable insights from data analytics while keeping access to their data under control. 

While working on these projects, you have also developed an original confidential computing solution - a clean room capsule which enables computations on encrypted data without exposing the underlying information, thus providing an environment for secure data collaboration. Recently it received a registered patent and was presented in several scientific journals. Can you tell us more about it, its uniqueness, and the benefits it can provide for businesses?

The patent addresses the industry's most pressing objectives: how to extract value from data without compromising its privacy. The solution is a secure and efficient tool that allows companies to collaborate their data pools without exposing raw data or risking data leaks. This approach opens new opportunities for more efficient and precise data analytics, data-based decision-making, and, eventually, more efficient operation.

It is easily scalable, suitable for companies of various sizes, from medium businesses to enterprise organizations. Moreover, it presents an unique combination of features, including encrypted computation, cross-cloud operability, a zero-copy principle, along with the ability to customize the solution for the needs of a particular company. 

Your work has been recognized not only by clients, but also by major industry players, like AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft. What do you think made these projects stand out on a global scale?

From the very beginning we focused on creating the solutions that will be applicable to real business scenarios. Creating a solution that is secure in theory is one thing, but ensuring it will function in an intended way in a real, unpredictable environment is another. This is the issue I always consider, when developing the solution.

The key concepts for this approach are scalability, interoperability and practical security, and focusing on them when creating solutions for secure collaboration allowed us to create products that truly stand out among competitors.

Your journey from building secure ETL systems at Saba Software to reading enterprise-scale clean room solutions looks impressive. What were the most valuable lessons for you as an engineer and architect?

One of my biggest takeaways is that security should be an integral part of the development process, not an afterthought. This way it becomes possible to build reusable, modular systems with privacy built in. This approach ensures companies can not only solve problems at hand, but also provide long-term solutions that can be easily maintained and scaled up when necessary.

Another important lesson is the power of cross-functional collaboration. Organizing productive interactions between different teams within the enterprise, such as engineering, product and compliance becomes a necessary component of success.

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Currently, your solutions are used by your clients across different industries, including financial, healthcare, and retail. Growing demand for privacy-first solutions is going on across different industries, so what would you recommend Indian startups to do in order to stay a step ahead of these developments and comply with both needs of prevailing regulations and demands of their clients?

While the startup ecosystem in India is booming, secure infrastructure still lags behind innovation in many companies. To overcome this security debt, startups need cloud-agnostic and scalable, secure environments to operate efficiently while adhering to regulation. As data collaboration becomes a cornerstone of modern business operations, and creating an infrastructure for secure collaboration and privacy controls will play a key role in further supporting the growth of the Indian digital economy and achieving sustainable digital leadership.