About the Bank
One of the world’s largest multinational banks provides a broad range of services, including investment and commercial banking, and wealth and asset management, to its millions of customers across the globe.
The bank’s leadership team has recognized the importance of data as a competitive tool, and committed to investing in resources to optimize data use and results. To streamline data use across all global lines of business, the enterprise data architecture team was tasked with implementing and managing access control of a central cloud data platform on AWS.
Challenge
The retail bank unit of this banking institution has a team of more than 5,000 data analysts who need real-time access to data that helps drive decision-making and strategic planning. However, with no way to grant and audit access to sensitive data across their diverse cloud data ecosystem, the team was forced to rely on manual processes with stringent approval workflows.
As a result, analysts were losing 35% of their time waiting for data access. Not only did this delay speed to insights – which in turn could impact the bank’s ability to grow – but it also introduced risk of data analysts identifying their own workarounds. After receiving a fine for millions of dollars due to weak data access controls and auditing capabilities, the bank could not afford to face another violation.
Solution
Immuta worked with the bank’s data team to identify a series of needs to help meet their data access goals and accelerate time to data access. Together, they identified four key objectives:
- Optimize approval rates, cost, and revenue
- Grow sales and market share
- Simplify access to new payment methods and technology
- Protect the brand and customers’ trust
They integrated Immuta into their tech stack, which includes AWS, Databricks, and Snowflake, to automate access request approvals and quickly scale access, allowing them to get insights and innovate faster and more securely.
With Immuta, the bank was able to:
- Identify personally identifiable information (PII) across the cloud data platform by implementing sensitive data discovery with standard classification.
- Extend the control and audit plane to additional cloud services to support consistent access control, while tracking when and how data is used.
- Create global policies once and implement fine-grained access control everywhere, with reporting and auditing capabilities to answer questions such as: who accessed what data over the last 30 days?
Results
With Immuta, the bank:
- Saved more than $50M in resources as a result of automating 95% of data access control requests, reducing requirements for data engineering resources.
- Decouple its on-premises data warehouse from cloud data access requests, thereby accelerating cloud adoption across lines of business.
- Scaled self-service data access to more than 5,000 users in just six months.
What It Means For You
Scaling data access — without compromising security or control — is a must for any organization. But as more users, including nonhuman identities and AI agents, demand fast access to more data, incorporating a tool to manage data access requests will be critical for maintaining a competitive edge and driving innovation forward. As this bank’s story demonstrates, integrating Immuta enables high speed and scalability while ensuring data use is secure and compliant — all while delivering tangible business results.