Beyond Workflows: Why Data Products Need a Data Marketplace 

Companies today are only as successful as their ability to put data to work. They invest heavily in pipelines and workflows to create valuable data products for analytics and AI. Yet, data product owners and data governors often realize something crucial is missing: a simple, secure way to find and use these products.

In other words, your data product factory might run perfectly, but what good is that if you don’t know who’s shopping at the store?

An internal data marketplace solves this problem by connecting your data production workflows with consumers who need governed access. For instance, the Immuta Data Marketplace provides a workflow-driven, cross-platform governance solution that delivers faster, safer data utilization.

In this blog, we’ll explore why workflows alone aren’t enough, demonstrate the value of a marketplace (especially in highly regulated industries like pharmaceuticals), and highlight how Immuta enables organizations to put data to work safely – and successfully.

The decentralized data dilemma: Siloed workflows vs. unified access

Even data teams in regulated sectors like pharmaceuticals routinely produce diverse data products: clinical trial datasets, real-world evidence (RWE), supply chain dashboards, and manufacturing quality metrics, to name a few. While the workflows to create these products (e.g. data pipelines, ETL, validation) are robust, ensuring easy and secure access remains challenging. According to a survey of 700+ data professionals, 64% reported facing significant obstacles to providing timely and secure access to data.

As organizations embrace decentralized data management, data often gets siloed within departments, with each protecting its own datasets. In our pharma example, clinical data might be inaccessible to manufacturing, or researchers may struggle to identify validated manufacturing data. The result? Slower insights, duplicated efforts, and increased compliance complexity.

Challenges managing data products without a data marketplace

Even with sophisticated workflows in place, organizations still frequently encounter a host of issues that stifle the impact of their data products and hinder the success of their data initiatives. These include:

• Poor discoverability: Data products exist, but locating the right one feels like searching for a needle in a haystack. Imagine a researcher who needs validated real-world evidence (RWE) for a regulatory submission. Without a clear catalog, they might waste days determining whether they’re using a validated dataset or outdated exploratory data, increasing compliance risks.
• Slow access approvals: Manual access requests cause delays, frustrating data consumers and delaying projects. For researchers running a clinical trial, this could result in delayed insights that impact the timeline and speed of patient outcomes, and delay time-to-market for new drugs.
• Inconsistent governance: Manually enforcing fine-grained policies (e.g., masking sensitive PII or PHI) across multiple datasets becomes impossible at scale. Inconsistently enforcing policies could result in overexposing sensitive data to unauthorized users, while locking out approved users entirely.
• Lack of consumer trust: Users often question dataset quality, freshness, or completeness due to missing metadata or unclear ownership. This can lead to risky workarounds as users look for more reliable data, or cause analytics projects to stall.
• Redundant work: Teams often recreate data products unknowingly, wasting resources and creating data duplication. For drug manufacturers working on supply chain optimization, this could result in confusion and delays that end up interrupting the supply chain instead of improving it.
• Limited visibility: Data product creators rarely see how, why, or by whom their data products are used, hindering continuous improvement and feedback loops. This could cause data products to become outdated, and raise frustrations between data consumers and data product owners, who are unsure about how best to serve users’ needs.

These issues stem from shortcomings in data distribution, discovery, and governance — not data creation itself.

How data marketplaces solve data product management issues

A data marketplace sits atop your existing infrastructure to organize and manage data products in a way that is secure and accessible. It complements data product workflows, enabling data owners to publish products with detailed, metadata-based context, and allowing consumers to discover and request access easily. Data governors maintain oversight and consistent policy enforcement.

Gartner defines a marketplace as “a collaborative platform enabling data producers to publish data products, and consumers to search, access, and use them, providing governance teams with the capability to control, approve, and audit data access and changes.”

This balance of openness and control is critical for securely operationalizing AI and analytics at scale.

Essential capabilities of a data marketplace:

• Centralized discovery: Users quickly find datasets by keyword, domain, tags, or certifications — no more combing through wikis or Slack threads. In our earlier example, a researcher searching for RWE would be able to easily find and verify the accuracy of the dataset, without having to worry about compliance risks.
• Rich context: Publishing data products with abundant metadata – including ownership, quality scores, schema details, refresh frequency, and lineage – increases data consumers’ confidence and clarity before requesting access. This helps accelerate data product discovery and delivery, resulting in faster insights.
• Self-service access requests: Data consumers request data within the platform, triggering automated workflows that stewards can easily manage, also from within the platform. This eliminates manual processes so that clinical trials, drug manufacturing, and other workloads can move forward seamlessly.
• Automatic access provisioning: With a data marketplace, approved requests grant instant access to data in analytics platforms, significantly accelerating time-to-insight. Data consumers do not need to wait hours, days, or even weeks to get access to the data they need to do their jobs, and they are better able to collaborate with data product owners.
• Consistent policy enforcement: Policies such as column masking, row-level security, and purpose-based restrictions automatically enforce data security without manual intervention. This ensures that data is protected consistently, across all platforms, users, and departments.
• Comprehensive auditing: Every action on a data product — request, approval, and access — is logged, ensuring transparency and compliance. This is particularly important in highly regulated industries like pharmaceuticals, where auditing for compliance is necessary on a regular and ongoing basis.

A marketplace thus avoids the pitfalls of standalone workflows by providing a secure, centralized platform to publish, discover, access, and share data efficiently.

The Immuta Data Marketplace: Putting the work in workflows

Immuta specifically enables secure, workflow-driven data marketplaces. By providing seamless, fine-grained data access control, Immuta ensures organizations can deliver fast, self-service data access without compromising compliance.

Immuta acts as a unified governance layer, connecting directly to data sources, such as cloud data warehouses, data lakes, and analytics platforms, classifying sensitive data, and dynamically enforcing access policies. The Immuta Data Marketplace interface simplifies data discovery, publication, and access requests.

What makes Immuta different?

• Automated policy enforcement: Define rules in plain language once, and Immuta automatically applies them across all connected platforms, continuously maintaining compliance with HIPAA, GDPR, GxP, and other standards.
• Fine-grained access controls: Immuta implements attribute- and purpose-based restrictions at row, column, or cell levels, maximizing secure data sharing while protecting sensitive information.
• Streamlined collaboration: Intuitive workflows enable data owners to publish datasets, data stewards to seamlessly approve requests, and consumers to easily request data — replacing siloed communication.
• Continuous monitoring: Comprehensive audit logs record all data interactions, integrating with security information and event management (SIEM) systems to rapidly detect and alert of unusual or unauthorized access.

Immuta integrates natively with popular data platforms, including Snowflake, Databricks, AWS, and Starburst, ensuring consistent governance across your entire data environment. Its federated governance model empowers local stewardship within overarching compliance frameworks.

Putting it into practice: How the Immuta Data Marketplace unites pharma teams

Consider a pharmaceutical company with siloed clinical, research, and manufacturing teams, each managing its data workflows separately.

Without a data marketplace, accessing critical cross-team data involves slow, manual processes, risking duplication and noncompliance.

With Immuta’s Marketplace, all data product owners publish curated datasets to a unified platform within defined data domains. Data consumers have a single place to search for and request access to data products, and data governors and stewards maintain full visibility over how those data products are protected and governed. This streamlined collaboration ensures the right data gets to the right people, without delays, frustration, confusion, duplication, or risk.

To continue our pharmaceutical example, consider a researcher who needs manufacturing quality data in order to bring a new drug to market. She searches in the Immuta Data Marketplace using semantic keywords, and easily discovers a data product named “Drug Manufacturing Quality Control.” Because of the metadata associated with the data product and available through the marketplace, she quickly understands what’s available and sees clear access guidelines.

After requesting access, Immuta’s automated approval workflow immediately routes her request to the appropriate data steward for review, with optional access recommendations based on data sensitivity. The data steward sees her authorized credentials and approves the request. Upon approval, Immuta automatically and instantaneously provisions her access. When she queries the data, sensitive patient information is dynamically masked based on her role. Her access is also automatically time-bound, expiring when it is no longer needed for analysis. This helps ensure continuous compliance and adherence to HIPAA standards.

Scaling this across multiple teams and products accelerates secure data sharing, fosters innovation, and significantly reduces compliance risk. Leading pharmaceutical companies, like Merck, successfully leverage Immuta to socialize data across teams while rigorously adhering to compliance standards.

Operationalizing AI with secure, scalable governance

While robust data creation workflows are vital, they alone are not sufficient to operationalize AI and analytics. A data marketplace transforms data products into actionable resources accessible across your entire organization by effectively orchestrating workflows. For organizations in highly regulated industries, like pharmaceuticals, a marketplace eliminates siloed access, compliance headaches, and redundant efforts, creating a controlled environment for secure collaboration. Immuta’s workflow-driven data marketplace is key to operationalizing AI and analytics safely and efficiently.

In pharma, where data-driven speed and accuracy directly impact patient outcomes, combining workflow-driven data creation with secure marketplace distribution provides critical competitive advantage.