In 2018, consumer data breach incidents in the US cost companies $654 billion. Cyberattacks continue to target US companies, siphoning off close to $6.2 billion in Q1 2019 already. To enable companies to meet benchmark data governance standards and detect sensitive data lakes, Immuta announced advanced privacy-enhancing features to its industry-acclaimed Automated Data Governance platform.

Immuta announced new updates to the Automated Data Governance platform at the ongoing Strata Data Conference, September 23-26, 2019. Immuta’s Fall 2019 release enables customers to automatically detect sensitive consumer data – such as first/last name, social security number and address – to build data privacy policies that ensure compliance with major data regulations, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Consumer Data Most Sensitive to Targeted Cyber Attacks

In risky cyber data ecosystems, cybercriminals constantly target personally identifiable information (PII). Almost 97% of the targeted data breaches were PII alone, reported ForgeRock US.

By targeting PII, cybercriminals prove that they’re hungry for consumer data and the research also found the most frequent attack method was from unauthorized access, encompassing 34% of all attacks. Healthcare, financial services and government were the sectors most largely impacted by cyberattacks.- ForgeRock

Securing Consumer Data is Tricky and Time-Consuming; Immuta Automated Data Governance Manages Complex Data Policies

A majority of organizations are embracing Digital Transformation by collecting, storing, processing and intelligently analyzing tonnes of personal information on-premise and in the Cloud. For companies that are new in their Digital Transformation journeys, understanding precisely where sensitive data resides is a primary challenge in regulatory compliance.

With these new features, Immuta customers can now automatically identify, classify and tag sensitive data as it is exposed through Immuta’s Automated Data Governance platform.

Specifically:

• Customers can now use Webhooks to enable third-party tools to react to Immuta events;
• Customers can use our new exposed interfaces to layer in both user and data attributes from existing business apps and systems to develop fine-grained user and data policies.

The new functionality expedites the process of understanding, protecting and operationalizing sensitive information by allowing customers to build global, automatically-enforced privacy policies natively through the Immuta platform without having to first discover and tag data themselves.

At the time of this announcement, Steve Touw, Co-founder and CTO, Immuta, stated –

“The first step in ensuring the privacy of consumer data is knowing exactly what sensitive information an organization holds, and where it resides. This process has proven to be tremendously difficult and time-consuming for data governance teams. Automating sensitive data detection is essential to achieving efficient, compliant data science, business intelligence, and other data-driven business processes.”

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Immuta Policy Engine Simplifies the Creation of Data Policies

Immuta enables automated visualization of the complex data policies, allowing data governance teams to control and monitor data access, view policies at work across multiple data environments, and ensure that compliance requirements are met. The Immuta Policy Engine simplifies the creation of data policies through easily readable, simple-to-build rules.

The Immuta Policy Engine includes data restrictions based on purpose, ensuring that specific datasets are only accessed for the right reasons – a key component of GDPR. All data activities are captured in rich audit logs, which can be used for insider threat forensics, to understand data usage, value, etc.

Immuta’s Fall 2019 release is available immediately to customers using Immuta within their data centers or cloud infrastructure, as well as to customers using Immuta Pro, the company’s Managed Cloud offering available through the Amazon Web Services (AWS) marketplace.

Quick Overview: Additional New Features in the Fall 2019 Release

Native HDFS Workspaces within Immuta Projects

Many Immuta customers – such as large banks and technology companies – utilize the platform to automatically govern Data Science and Business Intelligence teams working with data stored in Hadoop.

A new feature in the Fall 2019 release enables these teams to create native HDFS workspaces to ease the process of accessing data stored in HDFS, as well as writing derivative data back to Hadoop clusters at the completion of projects.

Derivative data published to native HDFS workspaces auto-inherits proper policies to ensure further compliance as that data is used in the future.

New Ways to Integrate Immuta with Other Applications and Tools

While Immuta has always led the industry in leveraging customers’ existing analytic tools and data sources, the Fall 2019 release includes two new ways to integrate Immuta within existing infrastructures, including:

Using Webhooks to enable third-party tools to react to Immuta events. For example, compliance professionals who set policies in Immuta can now receive messages in other applications if Immuta policies are changed.

Layer in user and data attributes from existing business systems and applications. For example, an IT department can now use exposed interfaces to create policies based on user-profile data stored in Sales Automation tools or HR systems.

Founded in  2014, Immuta is backed by 11 investors, and it has raised $28 million in three funding rounds.

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