For large-scale financial institutions, data governance is often a trade-off between security and speed. A leading Indian NBFC, managing millions of sensitive records under RBI regulations, found that their Hive Metastore (HMS) setup had become a bottleneck. Fragmented workspaces forced teams to clone data manually, while manual storage mounting created security vulnerabilities.

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The Infrastructure Hurdle:

The organization faced significant operational risks, including "subnet exhaustion" due to uncontrolled compute usage and security concerns surrounding runtime library installations. Without native lineage, demonstrating compliance during audits was a manual, labor-intensive process.

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The Transformation:

Partnering with Exponentia.ai, the NBFC migrated to Databricks Unity Catalog (UC) using the UCX toolkit. This wasn't just a metadata move; it was a complete governance overhaul. We consolidated five major workspaces, automated the migration of over 3,800 tables, and replaced risky access keys with Azure Managed Identities.

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The Impact:

The results were immediate. Storage costs are projected to drop by nearly 30%. More importantly, the institution now has end-to-end visibility. With Unity Catalog’s system tables, every query is auditable, and every data flow is mapped. Advanced features like "Time Travel" ensure that accidental data loss is a thing of the past.

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Conclusion:

By modernizing their governance layer, the NBFC has moved from managing infrastructure complexity to driving trusted, data-led insights. This transformation has positioned them to scale analytics confidently while remaining fully compliant with evolving financial regulations.