Databricks (Mosaic AI)

About Databricks (Mosaic AI)

Databricks provides a unified lakehouse platform that converges data warehousing, data engineering, machine learning, and AI development into a single collaborative environment. Originally built on Apache Spark, the platform now encompasses the Delta Lake open table format, MLflow for experiment tracking, and Mosaic AI for building and serving foundation models. Organisations across financial services, healthcare, government, and technology rely on Databricks to process petabyte-scale datasets while maintaining strict data governance through its Unity Catalog metadata layer. Mosaic AI, the AI-focused product suite within Databricks, enables enterprises to fine-tune open-source foundation models such as Llama and Mistral on proprietary data, create RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) pipelines, deploy model endpoints at scale, and orchestrate AI agents — all without sending data to third-party AI providers. This self-contained approach is particularly attractive to regulated industries that cannot expose sensitive data to external AI APIs. From a compliance and data residency standpoint, Databricks offers deployment on all major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) across virtually every global region, as well as dedicated tenancy and VPC-injection options that keep data entirely within the customer's cloud account. Unity Catalog enforces fine-grained access controls, column-level masking, row-level filters, and full audit lineage, enabling organisations to demonstrate data handling compliance to regulators. Databricks holds SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, HIPAA, FedRAMP Moderate (on AWS GovCloud), PCI DSS, and HITRUST certifications. For organisations subject to GDPR, DORA, CCPA, or sector-specific regulators, Databricks processes data within the customer-selected cloud region and supports Data Processing Agreements, SCCs for EU transfers, and BAAs for HIPAA-covered entities. The platform's open architecture means that model weights and trained artefacts remain fully owned by the customer, with no vendor lock-in on proprietary model formats. Databricks is used by more than 10,000 organisations globally, including a large share of the Fortune 500. Its governance-first design, broad certification portfolio, and ability to keep AI workloads entirely within a customer's own cloud environment make it one of the most compliance-ready AI and data platforms available to enterprise buyers.