As organisations move to the Databricks Lakehouse Platform on AWS, two priorities consistently surface at the top of every architecture conversation: data governance and secure storage access.
Unity Catalog addresses both — but one foundational component powers nearly every secure storage action underneath the hood:
Storage Credentials — the security backbone that connects Unity Catalog governance with AWS S3 permissions.
## 🚀 Why Did Storage Credentials Need to Exist?****
Before Unity Catalog, Databricks relied on cluster-level instance profiles to access S3. The problems with this approach were significant:
