Immuta and Snowflake help customers share data with automated privacy protection

Immuta, the automated data governance company, announced a technology and business partnership with Snowflake, the cloud data platform, enabling joint customers to securely share sensitive data with automated privacy protection, while adhering to data privacy regulations and business rules.

Featuring a new, native integration with Snowflake, the Immuta platform now empowers Snowflake customers to safely share even the most sensitive data sets securely by utilizing advanced, automated anonymization techniques.

This new joint innovation accelerates cloud-based data sharing and monetization strategies while helping customers to comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and other regulations or business rules.

Snowflake customers can now use Immuta to automate the enforcement of fine-grained access controls and privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) on data stored on the cloud data platform. Immuta-protected data can be accessed and analyzed directly within Snowflake, or over JDBC/ODBC to Snowflake, with no proxy.

Immuta performs real-time policy and security checks and privacy protection against every query. This unique innovation simplifies the process of preparing sensitive data for analytics and sharing, which often requires managing role-based access controls or the creation of SQL data views.

Immuta’s fine-grained, automated approach to data privacy and governance, now combined with Snowflake’s powerful, cloud-built data platform, gives data-driven companies a modern approach to accelerate analytics, secure data sharing, and data monetization initiatives, while balancing the need for both speed-to-data and data security.

“Large enterprises within regulated industries that need to analyze and share large amounts of sensitive data in the cloud face tremendous challenges,” said Rob Lancaster, VP of Alliances, Immuta.

“We’ve worked with Snowflake to accelerate cloud-based analytics and data sharing while abstracting and automating regulatory compliance and privacy protection. Companies can focus on business outcomes and value, without worrying about the technical and legal challenges of sharing data and performing analytics through the cloud.”

Specific features and benefits of the joint solution include:

• Fine-grained access controls: Immuta-powered data governance policies can be authored against Snowflake data using business metadata and purpose-based (PBAC) and/or attribute-based (ABAC) access control models, eliminating the need to manage roles before providing data access.
• Dynamic policy enforcement: Access and anonymization policies are enforced natively and dynamically in Snowflake without needing to create new anonymized versions of data or writing SQL or custom functions in Snowflake views. This includes managing decryption of encrypted/tokenized data based on policy.
• Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs): Immuta provides a wide array of PETs that allows customers to dynamically anonymize data, unlocking the value and utility of sensitive data for internal analytics and external data sharing.
• Analytic sandboxing: Native Snowflake access to Immuta-protected data allows users to create derivative tables and collaborate with each other at a common access level and guard against unintended data access grants without the need to create cloned Snowflake tables.
• External decryption: Enhance security by ingesting highly sensitive data into Snowflake in encrypted or tokenized form (not to be confused with encryption-at-rest) and decrypt based on policy, off-cloud, if desired.

“Snowflake customers want to leverage the cloud for BI and analytics, as well as for sharing data quickly, easily and securely with suppliers, partners and their customers,” Snowflake VP of Data Exchange, Justin Langseth said.

“Immuta’s advanced, native anonymization capabilities reduce the burden on data teams to build complex mathematical and privacy-based models to address these use cases. Our joint solution simplifies data sharing by adding additional protections that enable organizations to share more of their data than ever before.”