I’m very excited to report that today, Immuta and Collibra announced a new strategic technology integration partnership. In our many engagements with organizations around the world, we’ve found a common thread: they’ve put in a great deal of effort into entity tagging their data.
What does that mean? If you think about your data, it’s typically in the form of tables and columns. Those tables and columns have names/labels, which is how you reference and query them, or what’s called “the physical layer.” Above that layer can is a concept called “the semantic layer,” which consists of an entity mapping or entity ontology and ties descriptions of the data to the underlying physical labels. For example, when one table has a “Phone” column, and another has a “Contact Number,” a semantic layer becomes incredibly important because it can make sense of this and know both are Phones. This is what customers can capture in Collibra.
This is important for Immuta users because some policies on data need to act in the same conceptual layer. You can have physical policies that map to literal tables and column labels (for example, “Mask the Contact Number column for everyone except members of group Support Desk”). Or instead, with the features we introduced in version 2.2, you can leverage semantic policies, which we call “global policies.” (For example, “Mask phones for everyone except members of group support desk on tables with columns tagged Phone.”) That last portion of the policy uses the semantic layer as the criteria for where to apply the policy.
There’s a great deal of power that comes with semantic policies. Usually, organizations employ only a few individuals who truly know the ins and outs of all policies they need. With semantic policies, these few individuals can create them within the Immuta platform and know that they’ll be dynamically implemented. As long as the semantic data layer exists, anytime data is exposed, it will be protected.
With Collibra by our side, Immuta can leverage all of the hard work our customers have put into creating a semantic layer in Collibra and use it to drive semantic policies in Immuta. It’s a powerful partnership and our joint customers are already experiencing valuable results.
For a look at our integration in action, visit: www.immuta.com/downloads/partners-collibra-integration