Low Friction Data Governance With Immuta

Summary Data governance is a term that encompasses a wide range of responsibilities, both technical and process oriented. One of the more complex aspects is that of access control to the data assets that an organization is responsible for managing. The team at Immuta has built a platform that aims to tackle that problem in a flexible and maintainable fashion so that data teams can easily integrate authorization, data masking, and privacy enhancing technologies into their data infrastructure. In this episode Steve Touw and Stephen Bailey share what they have built at Immuta, how it is implemented, and how it streamlines the workflow for everyone involved in working with sensitive data. If you are starting down the path of implementing a data governance strategy then this episode will provide a great overview of what is involved. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management What are the pieces of advice that you wish you had received early in your career of data engineering? If you hand a book to a new data engineer, what wisdom would you add to it? I’m working with O’Reilly on a project to collect the 97 things that every data engineer should know, and I need your help. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/97things to add your voice and share your hard-earned expertise. When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. 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The platform uses machine learning to infer and learn your data, proactively identify data issues, assess its impact through lineage, and notify those who need to know before it impacts the business. By empowering data teams with end-to-end data reliability, Monte Carlo helps organizations save time, increase revenue, and restore trust in their data. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/montecarlo today to request a demo and see how Monte Carlo delivers data observability across your data infrastructure. The first 25 will receive a free, limited edition Monte Carlo hat! Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Steve Touw and Stephen Bailey about Immuta and how they work to automate data governance Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by describing what you have built at Immuta and your motivation for starting the company? What is data governance? How much of data governance can be solved with technology and how much is a matter of process and communication? What does the current landscape of data governance solutions look like? What are the motivating factors that would lead someone to choose Immuta as a component of their data governance strategy? How does Immuta integrate with the broader ecosystem of data tools and platforms? What other workflows or activities are necessary outside of Immuta to ensure a comprehensive governance/compliance strategy? What are some of the common blind spots when it comes to data governance? How is the Immuta platform architected? How have the design and goals of the system evolved since you first started building it? What is involved in adopting Immuta for an existing data platform? Once an organization has integrated Immuta, what are the workflows for the different stakeholders of the data? What are the biggest challenges in automated discovery/identification of sensitive data? How does the evolution of what qualifies as sensitive complicate those efforts? How do you approach the challenge of providing a unified interface for access control and auditing across different systems (e.g. BigQuery, Snowflake, RedShift, etc.)? What are the complexities that creep into data masking? What are some alternatives for obfuscating and managing access to sensitive information? How do you handle managing access control/masking/tagging for derived data sets? What are some of the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while building Immuta? When is Immuta the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of the platform and business? Contact Info Steve LinkedIn @steve_touw on Twitter Stephen LinkedIn Website Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Closing Announcements Thank you for listening! 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To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat Links Immuta Data Governance Data Catalog Snowflake DB Podcast Episode Looker Podcast Episode Collibra ABAC == Attribute Based Access Control RBAC == Role Based Access Control Paul Ohm: Broken Promises of Privacy PET == Privacy Enhancing Technologies K Anonymization Differential Privacy LDAP == Lightweight Directory Access Protocol Active Directory COVID Alliance HIPAA GDPR CCPA The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA Support Data Engineering Podcast