Organizations increasingly rely on data lakes to store, manage, and analyze vast amounts of information from various data sources. But building a data lake specifically on AWS allows you to leverage a comprehensive cloud ecosystem with a wide array of services.
In this blog, we’ll dive deeper into how to implement and govern data lakes built on AWS Lake Formation, and how doing so helps drive business by putting more critical data to work.
A data lake is a centralized repository that allows you to store your structured and unstructured data at any scale. Data can be stored in its original or raw form in order to be used for different types of analytics — from dashboards and visualizations, to big data processing, real-time analytics, and machine learning — to guide better decision-making.
AWS Lake Formation is a managed service that simplifies the process of building and managing data lakes. By allowing organizations to tap into the power of services like Amazon Redshift Spectrum and Amazon Athena for querying and analyzing Amazon S3 data, and Amazon EMR for big data processing, AWS Lake Formation seamlessly expands the capabilities and accessibility of your data lake – putting more AWS data to work.
AWS Lake Formation streamlines data operations by providing:
Several hundred companies rely on AWS Lake Formation to build and manage their data lakes more efficiently. Yet, maintaining governance and access control is often a challenge – especially as organizations scale their data lake initiatives.
There’s no question that AWS Lake Formation simplifies many aspects of data lake management. But as operations scale, so does complexity.
The five most common hurdles that organizations face are:
While these challenges can impede your organization’s ability to fully achieve ROI from its data lake, anticipating and planning for them helps mitigate inefficiencies, duplications, and dead ends.
As data lake governance becomes more complex, organizations often find that native solutions alone may not fully address their needs. Centralizing data security and governance within a specialized, integrated platform helps bridge the gap, while complementing AWS Lake Formation’s core capabilities. This approach allows organizations to leverage the strengths of both solutions, creating a more robust and secure data lake environment.
The teams at AWS and Immuta have collaborated for years in order to deliver innovative solutions that truly tap into the power of AWS services. So, it was a natural step to develop support for AWS Lake Formation that allows joint customers to put their AWS data to work.
Immuta & AWS Lake Formation Architecture
Centralized policy enforcement
Immuta centralizes, automates, and enforces data security and governance for AWS Lake Formation so that organizations can address data lake management challenges and accelerate data product delivery. By acting as a centralized governance layer, Immuta simplifies data access control, dynamically enforces policy, and provides comprehensive data discovery capabilities across your entire AWS Lake Formation environment.
Granular and scalable access control
With Immuta supporting AWS Lake Formation, you can define and enforce granular, attribute-based access control policies consistently across Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and Amazon Redshift Spectrum. Immuta’s dynamic approach automatically applies policies based on real-time context, such as user location, time of day, and data sensitivity. As a result, data is not just protected against unauthorized access, but access control policies are always up-to-date and relevant – enhancing data security with no additional manual effort.
Simplified data discovery and auditing
Using metadata, Immuta eliminates data discovery headaches by simplifying the process of finding what you need within a data lake. And just as easily as you can find your data, you can also keep tabs on it. Immuta’s unified auditing and monitoring capabilities allow you to track all data access activities and generate detailed audit logs. This means that you can monitor data usage across your entire AWS Lake Formation environment and proactively identify potential security threats.
Straightforward compliance processes
As data privacy compliance laws and regulations proliferate, Immuta helps adhere to standards with dynamic data masking, de-identification, and other privacy-enhancing techniques. For stringent legislations like the GDPR and HIPAA, Immuta offers the option to add purpose-based access controls on datasets so you can rest assured that users are accessing AWS data only for specific, authorized purposes.
The pace of innovation – and the evolution of technology to support it – will only continue to accelerate. As it does, Immuta’s support for AWS Lake Formation will allow companies to put more data to work in more use cases. Here are a few examples:
Consider a marketing team that needs to analyze customer data to understand campaign effectiveness and identify high-value customer segments. Immuta enables the marketing team to securely access the necessary data within the data lake, while ensuring that sensitive information is protected and only accessed by authorized personnel. This allows the team to perform its analysis without concerns about data security or privacy violations.
Financial services firms rely on data for every aspect of their business. For example, a finance team needs to gather data from various sources within the data lake to generate financial reports and perform risk analysis. Immuta’s data discovery capabilities help the team quickly identify and access the relevant datasets, including transaction records, customer data, and market data. This accelerates the reporting process, enabling the team to meet deadlines and provide timely insights to stakeholders.
As AI and ML continue to dominate the market, Immuta streamlines the process of preparing and accessing data for model deployment. By simplifying data discovery and providing secure access to the necessary datasets, Immuta empowers data science teams to build and operationalize models more efficiently.
For example, a data science team working on a customer churn prediction model can quickly access and analyze customer data from various sources within the data lake, without compromising data security or privacy. This accelerated workflow leads to faster model development and deployment, and ultimately, improved business outcomes.
The ability to effectively leverage data is now the differentiator between companies that compete, and those that fall behind. AWS Lake Formation helps achieve the former – and avoid the latter – by providing a solid foundation for building and managing data lakes. But partnering with Immuta enhances the capabilities that AWS Lake Formation offers, while addressing common challenges associated with data access control, security, and governance.
Immuta’s support for AWS Lake Formation seamlessly empowers data teams to:
By combining the strengths of AWS Lake Formation and Immuta, you make your data lake initiatives go further, drive innovation, and achieve better business outcomes – all by putting more AWS data to work, quickly and securely.
See how our partnership works in the self-guided AWS Lake Formation tour.
