Immuta and ServiceNow Partner to Address the Cloud Data Visibility Crisis

“Where is my organization’s critical data?” is the million dollar CISO question. Today, security leaders must be able to identify what data assets exist and where, so they can implement access controls to protect them.

Unfortunately, there is a data visibility crisis in the cloud, with organizations reporting that 55% of their data is obscure and de-identified. This not only makes it harder to generate insights, but leaves valuable data exposed and vulnerable to external threat actors.

Cloud security provider Immuta aims to address this by automatically discovering and classifying data assets in the cloud. Today, the company received a strategic investment of an undisclosed amount from ServiceNow, an extension of its $100 million Series E funding round last year.

With cloud adoption on the rise, the ability to discover and classify data assets wherever they exist in hybrid and multi-cloud environments is now critical, not only for enterprise security, but also for enabling decision makers to gain insight. of your data in a way that is compatible.

Addressing the cloud data visibility crisis

A central challenge for security leaders tackling the data visibility crisis is the need to be able to identify sensitive data in the cloud while implementing access controls to prevent unauthorized users from accessing it.

The implementation of access controls is an area in which many organizations are falling short. An Immuta survey of 600 data professionals found that 97% faced challenges in this area, with 54% reporting that securing data with the appropriate access rights is one of their biggest obstacles.

“The underlying problem is that securing data in the cloud is too complex,” said Matthew Carroll, chief executive of Immuta. “Today, organizations manage massive amounts of data in many different databases. They also have a significant increase in the number of users that need to access that data.”

He added: “In the background, there is an exponential explosion of data policies to manage who can access what data. However, the data is difficult to classify and label. Thousands of data policies must be created and managed. And it is almost impossible to monitor how the data is used.”

From a compliance perspective, if it can’t be monitored, it can’t be used. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the fact that one of Immuta’s customers, one of the largest banks in the US, had to shut down a data lake after only two years of operation because equipment Security and compliance had no visibility into the data it contained. .

Immuta aims to prevent these scenarios through a trio of security solutions: Discover, which scans, classifies, and labels sensitive data; Secure, which can design and enforce data access controls; and Detect, which continuously monitors data usage and analyzes the risk of leaks.

The idea is to equip CISOs and security leaders with a single tool they can use to identify and protect data assets in the cloud.

The data security market

Immuta’s solution falls within the big data security market, which Allied Market Research valued at $13.7 billion in 2019 and is projected to grow to $54.2 billion by 2027 as organizations turn to the data analysis to improve your decision making on the protection of your data assets.

One of Immuta’s main competitors is Okera, which uses machine learning to automatically classify and label sensitive data in the cloud, with the option to de-identify, mask, tokenize, encrypt, or anonymize user data.

Okera is currently valued at $29.6 million following a $15 million funding round led by ClearSky Security in December 2021.

Another competitor is Privatera, a data security and access control provider that offers a platform to automatically discover data and automate data governance processes to support SOX, PII, PCI, CCPA, HIPAA, FISMA, and GDPR compliance.

Privatera most recently raised $50 million in funding with a Series B funding round in 2021.

According to Carroll, the main differentiator between Immuta and its competitors is the use of attribute-based access control.

“Immuta leverages attribute-based access control (ABAC), rather than traditional role-based access control (RBAC), which according to a recent GigaOm report reduces policy burden by 93 times and can save organizations approximately $500,000 in time and opportunity costs. Carroll said.