You’re investing in data products to drive faster insights, better decisions, and greater innovation. But if publishing, finding, or managing those products is a bottleneck (or worse, a black box), your strategy won’t scale. It’s a common problem — a survey of 700+ data professionals revealed that 64% of organizations face significant challenges providing timely, secure access to data for authorized users.
In response, forward-looking organizations are turning to data marketplaces.
A data marketplace serves as the front door for data across your organization. It’s a centralized location where data product owners publish assets, data consumers find relevant data products and request access to them, and data governors enforce policies and monitor usage.
If your teams are creating and using data products but still navigating manual workflows, inconsistent governance, or unclear ownership, you need a better system. Enter the data marketplace.
What is a data marketplace?
A data marketplace is a centralized hub where curated data products are published and made available to data consumers. Think of it as the data equivalent of an app store: producers list their offerings, users search and explore, and access is provisioned with appropriate guardrails.
While external data marketplaces focus on buying and selling data between organizations, internal data marketplaces are built for secure sharing within an enterprise. Internal marketplaces help organizations improve collaboration and maximize the value of their own data assets, while maintaining control and compliance.
This article focuses on internal data marketplaces — the engine behind scalable, secure data product management that enables faster value realization, simplified collaboration, and proactive risk management.
Why internal data marketplaces matter now
Your team might be building invaluable data products — but if no one knows they exist, or if accessing them is too complicated, they won’t get used. In turn, the time spent curating them will have gone to waste and the business needs they are meant to address will fall by the wayside.
A marketplace gives your data products visibility, context, and accessibility. Instead of siloed, one-off processes, everyone operates from a shared platform to reduce friction and improve alignment.
A data marketplace also simplifies how you manage those products over time. From version control and metadata tagging to access approvals and monitoring, a modern data marketplace supports the full data product lifecycle — with workflows that automate access provisioning, enforce governance policies, and track activity in real time.
The role of data governance in data product management
One of the most valuable ways an internal data marketplace can support data product management is data governance. While governance is a critical piece of any data product strategy, it’s often what slows things down. Our research shows that 62% of data leaders say governance processes delay data access, and more than half (53%) still manage these processes manually.
Managing policies across multiple platforms, translating legal requirements into enforceable controls, and tracking access manually is inefficient and risky.
With an internal data marketplace, access policies are enforced dynamically across platforms. Sensitive data is classified automatically for easy discovery and tagging. And monitoring and auditing happen in real time.
Governors can define rules once and apply them everywhere, without writing code or creating – and having to keep track of – thousands of one-off policies. That means fewer manual steps, better policy consistency, and the confidence that data is being used appropriately across your ecosystem.
See how the Immuta Data Marketplace solution is eliminating bottlenecks without sacrificing security. Read The E-Trade Moment for Data.
What makes a data marketplace effective?
For your internal data marketplace to deliver real value, it should support:
- Simple, self-service publishing: Data product owners should be able to define, describe, and tag data assets, without needing IT support.
- Smart discoverability: Users should be able to search, filter, and browse data products with ease, based on relevant metadata and access permissions.
- Streamlined access workflows: Approvals should happen in-platform, based on policy and domain ownership, not by tracking down the right person in Slack or adding to email overload.
- Unified, automated policy enforcement: Access controls should be applied automatically, in real time, and consistently across cloud platforms.
- Continuous monitoring and reporting: Usage should be visible to governors, product owners, and platform teams so nothing gets missed.
These capabilities not only reduce the burden on your data teams, but also improve adoption, transparency, and trust.
How to turn data products into value – quickly and securely
The Immuta Data Marketplace solution enables fast, governed access to data products with built-in policy enforcement and real-time auditing. It provides a single platform where you can:
- Publish and classify data products with clear metadata and sensitivity tagging.
- Enable consumers to find and request data in seconds.
- Apply dynamic access controls based on policy, purpose, and user attributes.
- Monitor usage across cloud platforms with unified audit logs.
- Delegate access approvals at the domain level while maintaining enterprise-wide governance.
And with the Immuta Platform, policy enforcement is built in. That means data access is controlled and auditable — so you don’t have to rely on dozens of manual processes or thousands of static policies.
Immuta’s unified control plane makes it easy for data governors, stewards, product owners, and consumers to work together. By centralizing data access management, each role can efficiently perform its responsibilities – and collaborate with others – without jumping between tools.
- Data product owners can publish and classify assets with clear metadata and sensitivity tagging.
- Stewards manage domain-level approvals and enforce local policies.
- Governors define global policies and monitor usage across platforms to ensure compliance.
- Data consumers can search and request access through intuitive workflows.
All of this happens within the same secure, policy-driven environment, making it an integrated approach that streamlines collaboration, reduces risk, and accelerates access to data products.
Immuta customers have automated 95% of data requests, reduced time to access from weeks to minutes, and launched hundreds of new data products in a single year — all while improving security posture and lowering operational overhead.
Collaborate freely, govern confidently, and put data to work
Data product strategies don’t fail because of lack of vision. They fail because teams can’t scale access, governance, and collaboration. Internal data marketplaces are changing what’s possible for data product management. By making it easy to publish, discover, and access governed data products, internal marketplaces unlock the full value of your data — faster, safer, and with less friction.
To see what data product management means for data marketplace maturity, read The 5 Stages of Advancing Data Marketplace Maturity.