Pumpjack Dataworks
The world of sports is no longer confined to stadiums and TV. As sports have moved to a direct-to-consumer world, fans have more choices than ever before. Younger fans in particular are quickly establishing new viewing habits and loyalties. As more engagement services become available to fans, more consumer data is created, which increases its value to sports organizations. Yet, if these organizations don’t know their fan base, they cannot compete.
Pumpjack Dataworks is the world’s leading fan data platform that allows sports organizations to simplify data management and unlock the value of fan data. Customers like the Dallas Mavericks, Major League Rugby, and Inter Miami CF utilize Pumpjack to aggregate and unify their fans’ data, so they can deliver a best-in-class fan experience, and increase the value of their business.
In this dynamic privacy environment, Immuta’s SaaS deployment enables us to provide the highest standards of protection for fan data.
Challenge
As with most aspects of normal life, the business of sports during the Covid-19 pandemic was highly uncertain. What would a world look like without fans at venues? How long would attendance restrictions last? How would the businesses that depend on fans drive revenue stay afloat?
Faced with these questions, professional sports organizations were forced to pivot. It was possible to continue engaging with fans, so long as they had the right insights into what would resonate. As teams turned to digital channels to make these connections, Pumpjack Dataworks provided a platform on which to aggregate fan data and identify new revenue streams. However, the global nature of the pandemic also introduced a hurdle for Pumpjack: how to enable data sharing and analytics on sensitive fan data without violating international data privacy rules and regulations.
Solution
Data security laws and regulations dictating how organizations can and cannot handle sensitive data, including personal fan information, are becoming increasingly common – and therefore increasingly complicated to manage. Disparate standards, many of which are region-based, can create a web of compliance needs that run the risk of incurring costly fines if violated. Pumpjack Dataworks needed a way to enable its users to access and share personal fan data without inadvertently breaking the rules or delaying time to data.
Legacy technologies and static, role-based access control (RBAC) would have made systematically controlling access to data nearly impossible. These systems require roles to be manually created and maintained for each new user, data source, and rule, which quickly becomes unmanageable and unscalable. To make their customers successful and generate new business, Pumpjack needed a more dynamic approach.
After evaluating a competitive solution that leverages RBAC, Pumpjack’s data team chose Immuta for its “forward-looking outlook on access control,” including the platform’s ability to protect data with fine-grained, attribute-based access control (ABAC), dynamic data masking, and pseudonymization. Immuta’s SaaS deployment method allowed them to hit the ground running with dynamic access controls and always-on monitoring and auditing. This provided the flexibility needed to accommodate any region-based data regulation, and the peace of mind that data usage was easily trackable for compliance – all without slowing time to data.
“Our customers demand strict requirements across governance, user access controls, anonymization, and audit capabilities, ensuring that a layer of trust and protection is extended across their global fan communities,” said Tom Tercek, Pumpjack Dataworks’ co-founder and chief strategy officer. “In this dynamic privacy environment, Immuta’s SaaS deployment enables us to provide the highest standards of protection for fan data.”
Outcome
Sensitive data is central to Pumpjack Dataworks’ operations and its ability to deliver a best-in-class fan experience. With Databricks and Immuta, its data team has been able to empower self-service data discovery and analytics, while mitigating exposure and risk.
Unlocking the full value of Databricks has allowed Pumpjack to:
- Accelerate time data, insights, and market by automating sensitive data discovery and fine-grained access controls
- Comply with numerous international data privacy regulations and data localization laws without additional overhead or risk
- Simplify complex data environments to streamline data policy enforcement and unlock new revenue opportunities for billion-dollar franchises
