Immuta Streamlines and Scales Snowflake Data Sharing

Immuta, the leader in data access and data security, announced a joint solution that automates secure Data Sharing management for Snowflake customers. The new offering empowers Snowflake users to create, manage, and scale data sharing solutions faster, easing the manual burden on data platform teams and lowering the risk of data leaks.

With Snowflake, customers can share data with their business partners and allow them to use their own account to access the data, without physically moving the data. Also known as a “Snowflake Data Share,” this feature is valuable in many scenarios that necessitate data sharing across environments, departments, or companies, securely. For example, it enables conglomerates that have many disparate companies, or organizations that are managed separately due to legal requirements, to share data without combining or revealing compute costs with one another. However, permitting data sharing requires the data owner, who is typically a business user, to define internal and/or external data sharing controls, which presents both a technical burden and increased risk.

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“Proper data sharing, particularly when it comes to sensitive data, is critical to any modern analytics strategy. Organizations require secure, compliant data sharing to fuel the insights that create new revenue opportunities,” said Steve Touw, CTO, Immuta. “For example, by using Immuta to automate data security and access, organizations can confidently implement and accelerate revenue-generating initiatives and customer loyalty programs across various brands, while remaining compliant, and significantly reducing complexity and risk at the same time.”

Immuta automates sharing and management changes for data owners, reducing their technical burden and the operational risk of exposing sensitive data to the wrong business partner. Data sharing policies are written in plain language once in Immuta and can be applied everywhere so that any internal or external stakeholder can understand them. With Immuta, a data owner can enforce the appropriate access controls by simply describing what the consumer they are sharing with “looks like” relative to the existing Snowflake data access policies. This highly scalable process reduces risk by allowing the sharer to understand who they are sharing with, requiring only limited knowledge of existing policies, eliminating the need to alter the policy or policy lookup table, and restricting access to only the data they are allowed to see.

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“Cross-organizational data shares must be executed with care to adhere to existing access control requirements. Enforcement of controls must be managed within each organization prior to sharing, which requires cross-organizational coordination and implementation of Snowflake governance controls on the data to ensure all legal obligations are met,” said Tarik Dwiek, Senior Director of Technology Alliances at Snowflake. “With Immuta, we’re significantly reducing the complexity of this process through automation, empowering users to create and manage shares without manually editing Snowflake data access policies while ensuring the highest security standards.”

Australian-based conglomerate Wesfarmers, successfully implemented this type of cross-organizational data sharing. To create a cross-brand membership program, Wesfarmers and its subsidiaries chose a Snowflake architecture with data sharing as the primary method for exchanging data.

“Data sharing is critical to the success of OnePass,” said John Verran, Head of Data and Analytics, Wesfarmers OneDigital. “With Immuta, we are able to automate secure data sharing from OnePass to platforms across the Wesfarmers brands, accelerating data-driven initiatives while also ensuring appropriate risk and compliance controls are in place.”