Immuta expands partnership with Starburst to scale secure data access through automation

Immuta announced an expanded partnership with Starburst, the analytics anywhere company, to address growing data access control and security demands for modern data architectures.

The Immuta plugin, now shipping with every Starburst Enterprise instance, allows seamless integration with a customer’s Immuta installation. The partnership enables organizations to maximize the power and flexibility of data mesh architectures with fast, secure data access.

Faced with a growing number of data sources and increased agility demands, more organizations are adopting domain-driven data ownership and architectures (data mesh) to manage their data and analytics. However, the decentralized nature of a data mesh can make consistent data access control and policy enforcement difficult for organizations to manage at scale.

The simplified, built-in support for Immuta enables Starburst users across any domain to query data from any platform or cloud through Starburst Enterprise. With Immuta enforcing data access policies at runtime, customers can access valuable data faster, while having the confidence that they’re adhering to business and regulatory policies with comprehensive and easy-to-use access controls.

“We’re seeing more organizations adopt a data mesh architecture to reduce pipeline complexity and make data infrastructure more flexible and agile, but key challenges around secure access and governance remain,” said Steven Touw, co-founder and chief technology officer at Immuta. “As part of our continued support for the data mesh vision, this enhanced integration with Starburst arms users with the necessary tools to scale secure data access and policy management through automation, increase agility across teams by empowering more stakeholders to manage policy, and easily prove compliant data use at any time. This is an important step towards delivering more value from even the most sensitive data.”

Key capabilities of Immuta, which an integration plugin now ships with every Starburst Enterprise instance, include:

• Scalable attribute-based access control (ABAC) leverages user/subject attributes and metadata to create context-based access decisions at query time. Data teams can author policies in plain English, giving stakeholders better visibility into how data is protected.
• Sensitive data discovery and classification gives users access to over 60 prebuilt classifiers, as well as the ability to build custom tags that map to specific data privacy laws. This makes it easier for stakeholders across functions to inspect and approve tags, streamlining certification workflows.
• Data policy enforcement and auditing automates access control implementation at query time with no impact to user workflows, while providing unified data access logs that show how data is requested, accessed, and used. Immuta also enables organizations using service accounts from BI dashboards to impersonate end users in order to restrict access with no impact to the user or risk of a data leak.
• Advanced policy building and dynamic data masking through techniques like privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) enables data teams to easily limit data use for specific purposes to ensure secure data collaboration. Immuta allows users to implement both global and local policies, so that data and data platform owners can control access to data.

“Customers rely on Starburst as the analytics engine for all their distributed, decentralized data, but as data sources and volumes increase, creating data access policies and enforcing them across the enterprise presents a major challenge,” said Matt Fuller, Co-founder and VP of Product at Starburst. “By integrating Immuta’s data security capabilities with Starburst, organizations can ensure that the right people are able to access the right data at the right time. Expanding this partnership with Immuta will enable organizations to deliver faster, safer, more cost-effective data analytics wherever their data resides.”