Have you ever felt the frustration of waiting for data access? The demand for data insights is skyrocketing – but often, so is the time it takes to access data. If you’re like more than a third of data professionals, you’re waiting a week or more to gain access after submitting a request.
Everyone from CEOs to marketing managers needs fast access to reliable data, yet the processes in place often lag behind demand. This blog will explore how the Immuta Data Marketplace can accelerate data access in Snowflake, while ensuring the necessary governance and security.
Traditionally, data consumers were primarily analysts and IT teams. Today, they come from all departments and levels of an organization. This shift means that stakeholders such as marketing, finance, and HR are all leveraging data, often without the technical expertise traditionally needed to navigate complex data systems. The result? A growing demand for real-time access to quality data.
With this diverse group of data consumers comes a myriad of challenges. The data access governance and provisioning processes that once sufficed are now cumbersome and slow. Between data silos, compliance mandates, and the multiple stakeholders involved in data governance – which 33% of organizations say numbers 20+ people – these processes can lead to stale or outdated data by the time consumers get their hands on it. The widespread adoption of non-human identities, like AI agents, will make things even more complicated.
To address the needs of data consumers while still meeting governance standards, organizations are turning to internal data marketplaces. Marketplaces accelerate data product provisioning and delivery while maintaining oversight for data governance teams. The Immuta Data Marketplace, for example, brings data governors, stewards, product owners, and consumers together in a single platform to enable seamless data discovery, access, monitoring, and collaboration via automated, policy-based workstreams.
To understand how an internal data marketplace can help drive productivity, collaboration, and innovation, let’s look at an example using the Immuta Data Marketplace and the Snowflake AI Data Cloud. For years, Immuta’s native integration with Snowflake has enabled users to access and share data quickly and securely, with no performance impacts. With the addition of the Immuta Data Marketplace, those capabilities become even stronger and more scalable.
In this example, you will experience the role of the data governor, data product owner, and data consumer, giving you a 360º perspective of the integration.
Immuta simplifies and secures the data access process with a single platform that’s split into two key areas:
This structure gives data consumers fast, compliant access, while stewards, governors, and product owners operate in clear, auditable workflows.
When you log into Immuta’s Data Access Governance app, you will see your data sources organized by business domain. In a healthcare setting, these domains might include areas like patient outcomes, clinical trials, or operations. Each domain contains its own data sources, governance rules, and designated stewards responsible for managing access and compliance.
Once data within a domain is properly governed, you can build a curated data product that aggregates several relevant datasets. You can then publish it to the Immuta Marketplace, where it will also be reusable by your colleagues for their own related needs. When users enter the Immuta Marketplace, they’ll see a catalog of reusable data products with metadata, access instructions, and request options.
Imagine you oversee data governance for the Clinical Operations domain. While you’re not responsible for every dataset across the organization, you’re the expert for this business area. You understand how the data is used to support reporting on patient encounters, provider performance, and operational trends, and you know exactly what needs to be protected to stay compliant.
Using Immuta’s Data Access Governance capabilities, you review the metadata applied to your domain’s datasets through automated sensitive data discovery and classification. Fields like name, gender, and patient ID are automatically tagged. Global policies already mask commonly sensitive fields, like first name and last name, across all domains; however, patient ID isn’t included in those global rules.
Creating a masking policy in Immuta
Since your domain frequently shares data for operational reporting, you create a domain-level policy in Immuta to hash any column tagged as Patient_ID. Immuta instantly enforces this policy in Snowflake, and you can verify that Patient_ID fields now appear hashed across the relevant datasets.
You’ve just implemented fine-grained access control tailored to your domain, without writing code, editing roles, or requesting changes from a central IT team.
Once the data in the Clinical Operations domain is properly secured with masking and access policies, the next step is making that data usable across the business. As a data product owner, your role is to package governed datasets into reusable, well-documented products that others can easily discover and request.
Publishing a data product
First, you select a set of tables — such as patient, provider, and encounter tables from Snowflake — and publish a new data product in Immuta Marketplace. You include metadata, define a subject matter expert, and choose an appropriate data use agreement.
Since your data is already governed by global- and domain-specific masking policies, you choose automatic approval for access requests. That way, any qualified user can request the product and receive instant access, with confidence that sensitive information is protected by default.
You’ve now created a secure data product that others can trust and reuse. This helps teams deliver insights faster while maintaining compliance across the organization.
Now imagine you’re a data analyst working under a tight deadline. You need to analyze patient encounter data across healthcare facilities and deliver insights within hours, not weeks.
You start by logging into Snowflake to see what data is already available to you. In many cases, users automatically receive access to a baseline set of datasets relevant to their department. This is known as birthright access: access granted based on a user’s team, project, or function.
For example, as a Clinical Operations analyst, you may already have access to encounter summaries or provider directories used in routine reporting. These datasets are pre-approved for your domain and immediately available without a formal request.
Requesting access
However, for this analysis, you need more granular patient-level data beyond your default access. The schema isn’t visible in Snowflake, which means you’ll need additional permissions. Instead of submitting a ticket or waiting days for IT to grant access, you head over to the Immuta Data Marketplace.
In the marketplace, you locate a curated data product for Patient and Provider Encounters, and request access. Since the dataset is already governed with masking policies (applied automatically through data tags using Immuta’s sensitive data discovery), your request is approved automatically.
Seeing the results
Returning to Snowflake, you now see the schema appear in your workspace. Running a basic SELECT query, you confirm that fields like patient ID, name, and gender details are masked or redacted, ensuring compliance without blocking access.
In just minutes, you’ve transitioned from having no access to being a fully enabled data consumer with governed access that didn’t require any manual intervention, IT delays, or time spent deciphering policy logic. Immuta handled the complexity, so you could focus on delivering value.
As a data governor or data product owner, you may encounter situations where specific teams or individuals need access to masked fields for a limited time and clearly defined purpose.
For example, the Claims team requests access to unmask patient ID fields to support a billing audit. You adjust the masking policies to unmask patient ID data for that team, scoped to the audit purpose, and set it to expire after one week. The flexibility offered by this timebound approval feature allows you to maintain control over your data, while still adapting and enabling access for legitimate business needs.
The Immuta Data Marketplace is empowering organizations to seamlessly manage data access and collaboration amid growing volumes and complexity. By combining robust data governance with a user-friendly marketplace, Immuta enables you to accelerate data access while maintaining compliance and security. As the demand for data continues to grow, these solutions will be essential for navigating the complexities of data governance in a diverse and evolving landscape.
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