Despite advances in cloud technology, 64% of data leaders report facing significant challenges provisioning timely and secure data access. Data governors and stewards are caught in the middle of this dilemma, tasked with ensuring that data products are readily accessible and valuable, while also being secure and compliant. Traditional methods for managing data products – often involving manual processes and disparate systems – are at the heart of the issue.
The Immuta Data Marketplace solution bypasses these hurdles by providing a centralized, intuitive platform that streamlines the entire data product lifecycle. By automating key workflows, Immuta removes the burden of manual intervention, making data product governance and provisioning faster and safer. This not only accelerates data access and time-to-value, but also enhances security, simplifies data sharing, and improves collaboration between data stakeholders.
In this blog, we’ll explore a detailed comparison of data product delivery with and without Immuta, highlighting the vast efficiencies you can achieve with streamlined, automated, and intelligent processes.
To understand the impact of automated approaches to data product delivery versus manual methods, it’s important to know the stages of the data product management lifecycle. These steps are crucial for building and operationalizing data products quickly, safely, and confidently, so that they can provide immediate value:
When provisioning data products manually, your organization typically follows these sequential steps. While achievable, each step inherently introduces inefficiencies, risks, and complexity that can slow down data access and reduce business agility:
Your data engineering team must manually publish datasets, such as drug manufacturing QA data, into a traditional data catalog. This involves inputting metadata, data classifications, and descriptions by hand. Because manual entry is error-prone and hard to maintain, metadata quickly becomes outdated, incomplete, or inconsistent—compromising the reliability and usability of your data catalog.
Data consumers typically discover data products by manually searching or navigating the catalog interface. Traditional catalogs often lack robust, intuitive search and filtering capabilities, meaning users must already know exactly what data they need or rely on prior internal knowledge. This inefficient process creates bottlenecks, delays innovation, and severely limits self-service data discovery.
When data consumers identify data products they need, they must manually request access through a ticketing system, such as ServiceNow. Each request initiates a series of manual approval workflows involving multiple stakeholders, from data stewards to compliance and IT. This process is typically cumbersome and time-consuming, frequently resulting in prolonged wait times, unclear accountability, and frustrating delays for data consumers.
Once approvals are completed, the IT team is tasked with manually provisioning data access by assigning IAM roles or user attributes. This manual provisioning step is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and prone to human errors. Mistakes in manual access provisioning often lead to over-provisioning, incorrect permissions, or unauthorized access—significantly increasing organizational risk and administrative overhead.
Finally, ongoing governance involves manually auditing data usage by aggregating logs from multiple disparate systems. Regular access recertification often relies on manual tracking via spreadsheets and email approvals, introducing substantial compliance risk and overhead. Additionally, managing temporary or time-bound access requires manual tracking and reminders, which can easily result in overlooked permissions, leaving your organization vulnerable to compliance violations and security risks.
The Immuta Data Marketplace simplifies and secures the entire data product delivery lifecycle, eliminating many of the manual processes described above. With a centralized platform built specifically to enhance data sharing, governance, and collaboration, here are the steps to automating delivery:
When data products are ready for consumption, data product owners can effortlessly publish curated datasets in the Immuta Marketplace. Immuta provides intuitive tools for defining, describing, tagging, and classifying data, automatically keeping metadata current and accessible in one centralized platform.
Next, you can define clear data domains, and assign data stewards or approvers for each domain. This enables localized control and transparent governance; since business teams independently manage metadata and access approvals, your data IT resources can reallocate their efforts and eliminate bottlenecks.
Once data products are published and controls are enforced, data consumers can effortlessly search and filter through them directly within the marketplace. They can easily find what they’re looking for without IT support thanks to clear dataset descriptions, tags, and accessibility statuses. This intuitive discovery accelerates time-to-value since data consumers can find exactly what they’re looking for, driving more productive and informed data initiatives.
In contrast to manual approaches, Immuta automates the entire data access request and approval process directly within the marketplace. Data consumers request access through intuitive workflows, triggering automated approvals based on configurable policies, data classifications, user roles, or specific data use agreements. Domain-specific data stewards or approvers manage these policies transparently, ensuring consistent, secure, and timely data access. Once approved, Immuta automatically provisions the required data access across your existing data platforms through native integrations, eliminating manual intervention and reducing provisioning errors and risks.
Every interaction within the marketplace is automatically recorded in Immuta’s centralized audit logs, providing clear, centralized visibility into data usage for compliance. Recertification and temporary, time-bound access are managed automatically, so Immuta revokes access precisely when permissions expire, greatly simplifying ongoing compliance management.
To understand how this looks in practice, consider a data governor in the healthcare and life sciences (HLS) industry. This person is responsible for ensuring sensitive datasets, such as drug manufacturing quality assurance (QA) data, can be quickly, securely, and reliably across the organization.
Time is of the essence, since doctors and patients alike rely on the drug manufacturing supply chain to run as efficiently as possible. However, manual approaches often lead to inefficiencies, governance risks, and delays. Since the data governor must understand all of the data products being published and all of the requests coming in, and data consumers need to know exactly what they’re looking for, it often takes days or even weeks to provision the right data to authorized users.
When the organization switches to the Immuta Data Marketplace solution, the data governor immediately benefits from more centralized, transparent oversight of data products. They are able to work more effectively with both the data product owners and the data consumers to bridge the gap between what data products exist, and who should be using them for what purpose. As a result, data product delivery is faster and more accurate, while still being governed and secured. The organization is consequently able to run its QA systems more efficiently and minimize supply chain disruptions, ultimately leading to better quality of care and improved patient outcomes.
By automating manual governance processes, the Immuta Data Marketplace delivers:
The Immuta Data Marketplace empowers your organization to deliver sensitive datasets quickly, securely, and confidently, making data a true competitive advantage.
See how the Immuta Data Marketplace streamlines data product delivery.
