Data mesh was designed primarily to solve problems of scale and quality within large companies. However, data mesh lacks concepts for cross-organizational sharing of data products. Especially when dealing with sensitive data whose protection needs to be guaranteed, there is still a lack of solutions that allow data owners to effectively limit the usage or re-sharing of their data across organizational boundaries. This prevents many collaborative data sharing use cases, e.g. in the health care and pharmaceutical domain.
We therefore take existing concepts from Digitial Rights Management (DRM) and apply them to data mesh. Importantly, our approach avoids the need for a central authority, which is a common constraint with existing DRM solutions and that stands in contrast to data mesh's principle of decentralization.