Security Data Works

Public production architecture teardown

Bank Hapoalim — federated lakehouse on Trino/Starburst

Israel's largest bank migrated off Hive onto Starburst (Trino) over a Hadoop-based data lake — federated SQL access that leaves data where it lives. The published case is analytics-and-cost-led; its security relevance is the governance layer: granular federated access controls for cross-border data-residency rules, and ML models for near-real-time AML monitoring built on the federated data.

Federated

Access without centralization — Trino's ANSI SQL over disparate sources, with the granular controls a regulated bank needs to enforce international data rules. The bank's own quote: "ETL processes that took many months at high cost have become extremely fast and accessible to analysts at negligible cost." No security metrics are published; this is a regulated-industry data-federation pattern, not a SOC-telemetry deployment.

The pipeline

  1. Sources

    Disparate regulated data

    Legacy systems + data lake; cross-border / data-residency constraints

  2. Store

    Hadoop data lake

    Data stays where it lives; no forced centralization

  3. Query

    Starburst (Trino)

    Federated ANSI SQL; SAS / Qlik integration for analysts

  4. Govern

    Granular access controls

    Enforce international data-residency rules at query time

  5. Apply

    Near-real-time AML monitoring

    ML models on the federated data for anti-money-laundering

What composes, what’s brittle

  • Why federation. Cross-border data-residency rules make leave-it-in-place access the security-relevant choice.
  • Security angle. Access governance + AML monitoring — compliance / financial-crime, not threat-detection telemetry.
  • What's published. Analytics and cost outcomes; no security metrics are disclosed in the case.
  • Why it's here. A named regulated-finance federated-lakehouse pattern — the access-governance lesson generalizes.
  • Honest scope. Thinner on security than the other teardowns; included as a governance / data-residency reference, not a SOC build.
  • Engine. Trino via Starburst — ANSI SQL keeps query logic portable.

Sources: Starburst case study, "Bank Hapoalim" (starburst.io) · Starburst / Trino federated-access and AML-monitoring coverage.

See how the pattern lands on your workload.

The matrix scoring that justified each reference architecture's tool choices is the paid deliverable. The benchmark behind it is public — reproduce it on your own workload, then book a call to scope the work.