We have all seen capabilities for publishing data products, surfacing them for data consumers to discover and request access, and making access decisions. But what about when that data product contains sensitive columns that some users should see but others should not? The state-of-the-art solution to date for this workflow...
Managing access requests to data can be an overwhelming job for data stewards – and the pressure is mounting. The number of data users will continue to explode as AI capabilities make it more accessible for all users – not just analysts or data scientists – to derive insights from...
Data product owners are under constant pressure to publish and manage data products that fuel growth, innovation, and collaboration – at scale and speed. But they’re often at odds with data governors, who have the daunting task of classifying the sensitive information within those data products, enforcing the appropriate policies...
In today’s globalized business landscape, data is a critical asset. However, they must still contend with the friction between provisioning data in real-time, and maintaining security and compliance. For companies dealing with sensitive defense-related information, the stakes are particularly high due to the non-negotiable need to ensure compliance with regulations...
How much time have you spent sifting through organization-level data trying to find the right data sets for your specific needs? Not to mention that once you find what you’re looking for, you may find yourself waiting for a centralized IT team to approve your access request – which could...
Genomic data holds significant promise in advancing personalized medicine, streamlining disease treatments, and improving health outcomes. By leveraging individual genetic profiles and biomarkers, genomic data allows researchers to improve treatment accuracy and efficacy. But this promise carries significant privacy risks. The volume and high dimensionality of genetic data introduces a...
In 2020, global spending on cloud data services reached $312 billion. In 2022, Gartner estimates that this number will rise to a staggering $482 billion. This immense increase proves that the migration to and adoption of cloud platforms is the bona fide standard for contemporary information services and analysis. With...
In the 2024 State of Data Security Report, a vast majority (88%) of data professionals reported that employees at their organizations are using artificial intelligence (AI). But, only 50% said that their organization’s data security strategy is keeping up with AI’s rate of evolution. This exemplifies a growing challenge we’re facing with contemporary...
We recently conducted an intriguing webinar exploring the data mesh concept, and how it’s transforming the way enterprises decentralize data to enable cross-functional, self-service products tailored to users’ needs. Though appealing for most organizations, executing a data mesh poses real complexities. At phData, we’ve implemented several successful data mesh platforms for our customers, and...
Compliance regulations in the data security space are constantly changing and evolving, with more new acronyms for regulatory standards being introduced every year. In our global economy, staying compliant with government and industry regulations can be challenging, but with the right strategies, it doesn’t have to be a major burden....
Like other modern advancements in data use, the data mesh concept is rooted in a central goal: give more users easier access to business-driving data. But like many data initiatives, implementation can be much more difficult than it seems. A data mesh architecture is an amalgamation of moving parts, decentralizing data away...
If you’ve heard the term CMMC being used more frequently, you’re not alone. This upcoming change in certification requirements for Department of Defense contractors and subcontractors will have major implications and require significant changes for organizations in order to continue landing government contracts Here are all the basics of CMMC,...
Before we can talk about modernizing from a legacy Business Intelligence (BI) extract, we need to answer the questions: why are they used? And what are they? The “why” behind extracts boils down to improved query performance on published dashboards. You can see more details about the “why” for data extracts in...
Databricks table ACLs let data engineers programmatically grant and revoke access to tables. With table ACLs enabled, users have no access to data stored in the cluster’s managed tables by default until granted access, thereby improving sensitive data security. With Databricks runtime 3.5 or above, table ACLs allow authorized users...
For Dave DeWalt, Founder and Managing Director of advisory firm (and Immuta investor) NightDragon, the modern data stack–like dragons–has a compelling dual nature. Balancing power with danger, both evolving data stacks and dragons contain immense potential strength that can (quite literally) go up in flames if not managed properly. DeWalt, John Cordo,...
The ability to efficiently discover data and visualize it in meaningful ways has never been more important. Tools like Tableau allow users to see data in an easily interpretable, shareable way that empowers data-driven decision making. However, with more organizations now collecting, storing, and analyzing sensitive data, the onus is on data...
Data is essential to modern business, thanks to its ability to improve insights and drive competitive decision-making. Yet, while many organizations are adopting cloud data platforms to simplify seamless onboarding of new data sources, managing access to data can significantly slow time-to-value. Should this stop you from adding more data...
The modern data stack bears the immense responsibility of storing, protecting, analyzing, and operationalizing a resource that is constantly in flux. As data continues to increase and evolve, these tools need to make sure it is both being used effectively and kept safe from leaks. This issue and potential solutions...
As data moves among the storage, compute, and analysis layers of a data stack, there is constant need for measures to ensure its security and protect personally identifiable information (PII). This security is often required by law, as is evident through financial regulations like PCI-DSS, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, and more. Immuta’s integration with Databricks helps...
Have you wondered how to protect your Snowflake data warehouse with column-, row-, and cell-level protection while accelerating time to your cloud data? With Immuta SaaS on Snowflake Partner Connect, access to data is faster and more secure than ever. Immuta provides data teams with one universal platform to control access to...
Data masking is a data access control and security measure that involves creating a fake but highly convincing version of secure data that can’t be reverse-engineered to reveal the original data points. It allows organizations to use functional data sets for demonstration, training, or testing, while protecting actual user data from breaches or...
Governance and security are hot topics in data mesh, as evidenced by the recent webinar I co-presented with Andy Mott at Starburst that landed 350+ registrants, including the who’s who of industry luminaries on the topic. It’s easy to see why – without proper planning, decentralization can become the wild west of data management....
This blog was co-authored with Deepak Nelli, Director of Sales Engineering at Alation. The modern data environment is changing. Cloud data platforms provide data-driven organizations with advanced analytics capabilities alongside much-needed simplicity; yet, greater demand for data, more data consumers and use cases, and a growing body of data use...
According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, there were 1,862 data breaches in 2021, exceeding the previous record of 1,506 in 2017. Of these breaches, 83% contained sensitive information that became available to the attackers. The exposure of large swaths of raw data, especially when sensitive, can have dangerous consequences. In...
In 2021, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) published its new data strategy, which seeks to improve how data is developed, managed, accessed, and shared to maintain an advantage in geospatial intelligence. In its strategy, the organization pinpoints goals and action plans that the NGA, the Department of Defense (DoD)/Intelligence Community (IC),...
Attribute-based access control (ABAC) grants or restricts access to data using context-based decisions based on information about the user, the data itself, the intended action, and the environment generally. It’s well-documented that ABAC is the more flexible, scalable access control option when compared to static role-based access control – NIST has formally supported...
As cloud adoption accelerates, SaaS-based products have also exploded to fill the agility, scalability, and flexibility gaps of legacy solutions. McKinsey estimates that by 2024, the market for SaaS products will reach $200 billion, and according to BMC, more than three-quarters of SMBs have already adopted a SaaS product. While certain SaaS-based services...
There’s a lot of confusion in the market about attribute-based access control (ABAC) and what it actually is. This short blog will use a handy analogy to explain ABAC.
Identity and access management (IAM) systems have become essential components of organizational workflows, allowing users to access the appropriate tools without requiring admin privileges. But when it comes to data access control, organizations are often left wondering why the user information stored in their IAM software can’t also be leveraged to...
Immuta is the universal cloud data access control platform that gives data engineering and operations teams the power to automate access control across their entire cloud data infrastructure. By leveraging metadata to build and automatically enforce data access policies at query time, Immuta allows organizations to unlock the full value...
For Data Engineers responsible for delivering data to consumers, the effort needed to wrangle policies can quickly get out of hand as the complexity of data access controls increases. High segmentation of table access necessitates the management of a correspondingly high number of roles and grants. For example, if data...
The good news is no. The better news is you are already 90% of the way there and probably don’t even know it!
There’s an old adage that all press is good press, but one kind of attention that’s been showered on companies both large and small in recent months is the type that no organization wants — scorn after an inadvertent data leak. While keeping customer data safe from leaks may seem...
Immuta was born out of the Intelligence Community in 2015 to help organizations solve the most complex data access control challenges. These challenges have only grown since that time as our dependency on sharing sensitive data across platforms and groups to support decision makers has increased. To meet the needs of this...
Kaj Pedersen, Chief Technical Officer at AstrumU, joined Immuta and Databricks at a recent Amazon Web Services Machine Learning Dev Day. This blog recaps his presentation on building a data governance and compliance strategy. Before founding AstrumU, Adam Wray identified a crucial — and costly — problem plaguing the American employment...
The pros and cons of role-based access control (RBAC) and attribute-based access control (ABAC) have been well documented and debated. There are even different implementations of ABAC that use static attributes, defeating the intent of safely scaling user adoption. But understanding the delineations between different approaches and soundly implementing one or both...
The terms role-based access control and attribute-based access control are well known, but not necessarily well understood — or well defined, for that matter. If attribute-based access control includes user roles, then what is role-based access control? Where is the line drawn? Fundamentally, these data access control terms — role-based access control and attribute-based access control...
Cloud provider capabilities are evolving faster than ever, and enterprises are taking notice. With all the progressive features, cost savings and labor efficiencies modern cloud data access control platforms offer, why wouldn’t organizations seize the opportunity to accelerate data analytics and derive insights that could give them a competitive edge? Unfortunately, cloud migration doesn’t...
The new Databricks Enterprise Cloud Service architecture provides powerful network security capabilities, however, a lesser known benefit is that it enables Data-as-a-Service.