Immuta Detect Provides Proactive, Reactive Data Security

Immuta Detect, Immuta’s latest offering for securing data access and data governance, was released today. The product is currently available for private preview within Immuta’s Data Security Platform.

Immuta Detect adds to the platform’s capabilities to manage aspects of regulatory compliance, data privacy, and data protection at enterprise scale. It simplifies these concerns for organizations dealing with the complexities of hybrid and multicloud environments, in which data is dispersed among a multitude of tools and systems.

“A lot of companies we talk to start with this low maturity perspective of please help me understand what’s happening in my world,” said Matt DiAntonio, Immuta VP of Product Management. “It feels like a black box to them and it feels scary. They don’t know where they have activity, never mind risk.”

The new solution directly identifies areas of risk within a company’s data management infrastructure in a couple of ways. It provides advanced analytics about access behavior to continuously monitor activities that may violate security and data governance rules. It also proactively finds areas of risk, quantifies them via a scoring system, and helps companies understand what’s needed to rectify them before security woes occur.

When combined with the capabilities for simplifying data security across ecosystems (which Immuta’s platform already has) users can now “see what’s happening in their environment, what users are doing, where they’re querying things, what data sources are being actively used, how sensitive they are, and how well mitigated is the risk,” DiAntonio revealed.

Reactive Protection

Immuta Detect’s access behavior analytics primarily works by scrutinizing log data from a number of different sources. Immuta’s platform previously had the capability to consolidate log files from an array of sources — including those across numerous cloud types and ecosystems. “We look at that and what’s happening in your identity provider and what’s happening inside Immuta natively, combine those into one data layer, and then put the analytical engine and the reporting and alerts on top,” DiAntonio mentioned. The access behavior analytics examines all this data holistically to provide critical logistical information about data access when there’s a need for it, such as when a breach is suspected.

Users would simply need to select the particular time frame in which there was exposure “and you get a comprehensive look at what was happening, how much sensitive information was exposed, who exposed it in terms of users, queries, and system users,” DiAntonio commented. “But also, were there policies in place to protect it, and what were those policies.” The ability to perform analytics to glean this insight across an organization’s entire data management ecosystem is as valuable as the automation involved, which saves hours of manual labor.

Proactive Protection

Immuta Detect also endows organizations with the capacity to determine lapses in security before any events, regulatory penalties, or costly litigation happens. Of particular import for this form of proactive monitoring are the product’s mechanisms for assessing and scoring areas of risk. If organizations are interested in buttressing their data security and access controls, “Detect can go in and look to see where you have an opportunity to improve,” DiAntonio remarked. “That could be where you have sensitive information and no policy, or maybe a policy that’s not offering the right level of authentication.”

Immuta’s reporting provides visualizations of such areas and scoring of the particular risk involved. That scoring frequently hinges on contextualization, including which systems are involved, who the users for it are, which regulations the data in those systems is subject to, and other considerations. Immuta can also provide this functionality for policies within source systems like Snowflake, for example. “In each of the highly regulated environments where this would really shine, it matters where you’re operating and the rule set around it,” DiAntonio noted. “Are we dealing with a HIPAA environment, a non-HIPAA environment? Are we concerned with CCPA regulations? Depending upon the constraints that are put in place, and the purpose that you’re acting under, the concept of security or risk is relative.”

Risk Mitigation

Immuta Detect is able to minimize risk associated with data security, data governance, and regulatory compliance in a couple of pivotal ways. It’s able to respond to potential access control or security events with timely analysis of log data, queries, and user behavior for rapid logistical information about the event. Such information is invaluable for accelerating responses to those events.

Additionally, it can pinpoint weaknesses in an organization’s security or governance controls so they can be rectified to reduce the likelihood of compliance or access control mishaps occurring. This tandem is ideal for the range of threats and regulations impacting modern organizations.