The Future of Secure Data Collaboration: AWS Clean Rooms 2024 Breakthroughs

4 min readFeb 21, 2025

Imagine a magical room where you can analyse data from multiple sources without seeing or sharing the raw data. A room where the collaboration of raw data is secure and never revealed. This is the promise of AWS Clean Rooms — a cutting-edge solution enabling secure data collaboration without compromising privacy.

Challenges solved by AWS clean rooms

Data collaboration is crucial in today’s digital economy. Companies often possess valuable datasets that, when combined with data from other organizations, can unlock transformative insights. However, traditional data-sharing methods pose significant challenges:

  • Privacy Risks: Sharing raw data increases the risk of exposing sensitive information.
  • Regulatory Compliance: Stricter data protection regulations make it harder for companies to share data without breaching legal frameworks.
  • Data Governance: Maintaining control over proprietary information while collaborating is complex.

AWS Clean Rooms addresses these challenges by allowing organizations to collaborate on datasets without ever exposing or sharing the underlying raw data. For example, Company A and Company B can securely analyze combined data to identify mutual customers or optimize marketing strategies — all while ensuring customer privacy remains intact.

By leveraging AWS Clean Rooms, businesses can unlock valuable insights while maintaining full control over their sensitive data, opening the door to new opportunities without compromising compliance or security.

AWS clean rooms capabilities — re:Invent 2024

At AWS re:Invent 2024, several exciting advancements in AWS Clean Rooms were unveiled, enhancing its capabilities and usability:

  • Enhanced Query Controls: Fine-grained query management allows users to define who can query data, what can be queried, and how results are presented, ensuring no sensitive data is revealed.
  • Multi-Party Collaboration: Support for multi-party clean rooms enables up to five organizations to securely collaborate within a single clean room.
  • Entity Resolution: Advanced entity resolution capabilities allow businesses to match and link records across datasets without revealing identifiable information, enhancing collaboration accuracy.
  • Cross-Cloud Collaboration: AWS Clean Rooms now supports secure collaboration on data originating from different cloud providers, allowing organizations to analyze and derive insights without data migration.
  • Automated Data Transformation: Built-in tools to standardize and anonymize datasets before collaboration to further protect data privacy.
  • Machine Learning Insights: Integration with AWS SageMaker enables participants to run advanced analytics and machine learning models without exposing raw data.
  • Audit and Compliance Monitoring: Real-time logging and detailed reports ensure transparency and facilitate compliance with industry regulations.

Querying using analysis rules

AWS Clean Rooms offers three types of analysis rules for querying data securely:

  • Aggregation: Perform statistical analysis like sum, average, or count without revealing individual data points.
  • List: Retrieve specific lists of identifiers that match agreed-upon criteria while preserving privacy.
  • Custom: Define advanced and tailored query logic to suit unique collaboration needs while adhering to privacy controls.

These querying rules are essential because they enforce strict privacy controls while enabling valuable insights. They ensure sensitive data remains protected by defining what can be queried and how results are presented. This approach allows organisations to analyse combined datasets while complying with privacy regulations and maintaining control over their proprietary information. By supporting flexible query types, AWS Clean Rooms enables precise, secure, and collaborative data analysis without exposing raw data.

Getting started with AWS clean rooms

  1. Create a collaboration

2. Add members of the collaboration and specify their capabilities.

3. Define who will pay for running the queries.

4. Set up the query results destination.

5. Review and create.

Real-life use cases of AWS clean rooms

Organisations across industries are already using AWS Clean Rooms to unlock value from secure data collaboration. Some compelling use cases include.

Retail and Marketing: Retailers and advertisers collaborate to analyse purchasing behaviour and optimise marketing campaigns. By leveraging AWS Clean Rooms, they can identify shared customers and deliver personalised experiences without exchanging sensitive data.

Healthcare and Life Sciences: Pharmaceutical companies and research institutions can collaborate on clinical trial data while ensuring patient confidentiality. This enables accelerated drug discovery and improved patient outcomes without violating privacy regulations.

Financial Services: Banks and financial institutions use clean rooms to detect fraud patterns and assess credit risks by securely combining transaction data without exposing customer identities.

Media and Entertainment: Media companies collaborate with advertisers to measure audience engagement and improve ad targeting without sharing raw viewer data.

AWS Clean Rooms represents a transformative leap in secure data collaboration. By enabling organisations to derive valuable insights while preserving privacy and control, AWS is paving the way for innovations and partnerships across industries. As data collaboration evolves, AWS Clean Rooms will continue to be a cornerstone for companies seeking to unlock the full potential of their data without compromising security or compliance.

Thank you!

Let’s connect on LinkedIn

--

--

No responses yet