Immuta adds provisioning prowess to speed insight generation

Powering provisioning

Historically, data-driven decision-making had plenty of lag time. Data was often controlled by a central team, and requests for reports and other data assets generally took weeks -- sometimes months -- to fulfill.

The combination of guardrails, exception handling and multi-approver capabilities with the Marketplace creates a complete end-to-end system that can handle policy-driven automatic approvals and request-based access in one platform.

The rise of self-service analytics around 2010 changed that to some degree, but weekly, monthly and quarterly reports were still the basis for many of the insights that led to decisions and actions.

Worldwide events beginning in 2020 such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, repeated supply chain disruptions and economic uncertainty radically altered the speed that decisions had to be made, placing greater emphasis on real-time data. Surging interest in AI, sparked by OpenAI's November 2022 launch of ChatGPT, has only heightened the emphasis on real-time decision making.

Reducing what had been a time-consuming provisioning process down to minutes is therefore crucial, according to William McKnight, president of McKnight Consulting.

"Immuta's Marketplace and structured workflows accelerate secure data provisioning at enterprise scale, eliminating the bottleneck that slows analytics and AI initiatives," he said. "By automating fine-grained access controls across cloud platforms, Immuta enables faster data use by both human users and AI agents without compromising security."

Perhaps the most valuable new feature is Guardrail Policies, McKnight continued.

"While the Marketplace delivers the speed, the Guardrail Policies stand out as crucial for governance teams because they ensure the integrity and safety of the system, allowing the rapid speed afforded by the Marketplace to be sustainable at scale," he said.

Catanzano likewise called out Guardrail Policies. But while McKnight noted that the feature fosters speed and scale, Catanzano highlighted its preventative nature, particularly with AI agents capable of taking on tasks without human involvement.

Beyond the individual features that comprise Immuta's improved data provisioning capabilities, the suite is designed to integrate with data catalogs and other governance platforms to further speed and simplify the provisioning process.

The rise of generative AI (GenAI) and AI agents provided Immuta with the impetus for developing its new capabilities, according to Matt Carroll, the vendor's CEO. GenAI has enabled more people within organizations to work with data, he noted. However, in doing so, it has also exposed enterprises to a greater risk of data breaches and regulatory noncompliance.

"With so many new data consumers, the challenge becomes how to make data discoverable and accessible while still enforcing the right policies and controls," Carroll said. "That's what led us to develop data provisioning workflows."

While valuable for Immuta's users, whether the new data provisioning capabilities can help the vendor stand out from its competitors remains to be seen, according to Catanzano. Immuta's new features comprise a unified data provisioning workflow that automates processes that previously took significant time, but vendors such as Informatica also provide data provisioning capabilities, he noted.

Where Immuta could have an advantage is speed.

"Immuta's focus on AI-scale access requests may differentiate it from traditional governance tools that weren't built for dynamic, high-volume environments," Catanzano said. "But ... I don't think it's a major differentiator. All the major players moving and governing data have a strong story here, but with some nuances."

McKnight similarly mentioned speed as a way Immuta might separate from other vendors. While many provisioning platforms show users what data exists and allow them to request access, Immuta's automates secure provisioning.

"Immuta automatically applies the right policies -- masking, filtering, anonymization -- at query time across cloud platforms," McKnight said. "It's the difference between discovering data and actually getting governed access to it in minutes [rather than] weeks."

Next steps

Looking ahead, Immuta is planning to add native integrations with data warehouses and database platforms to make it easy for customers to access data where it lives, according to Carroll. In addition, the vendor plans to deepen partnerships with data catalogs, add conversational interfaces to simplify using its tools and launch its Agentic Data Governor, he continued.

"Thematically, 2025 and early 2026 are about expanding connectivity, embedding Immuta wherever data is discovered, bringing governance into conversational AI, introducing native AI to accelerate access and decision-making and delivering intelligent, customer-specific governance agents that redefine what secure, automated data provisioning looks like," Carroll said.

Focusing on AI governance capabilities with tools such as the Agentic Data Governor is wise, according to McKnight, who noted that while the new data provisioning tools advance one part of Immuta's platform, others also need improvement.

"The company must advance its GenAI governance by building dynamic prompt and output controls that detect and protect sensitive data in [large language model] interactions in real time," McKnight said.

In addition, adding native connectors to broaden its data integration capabilities and evolving from alert-based monitoring of policy violations to automated remediation are ways Immuta could better serve its users, he continued.

Catanzano, meanwhile, suggested that Immuta add AI-powered capabilities to its provisioning suite, among other ways the vendor could potentially advance its offerings.

"Immuta could expand into AI-native features like intelligent policy recommendations based on usage patterns or real-time data quality scoring within the provisioning workflow to ensure AI systems get not just governed data, but high-quality governed data automatically," he said.

Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget and a journalist with more than 25 years of experience. He covers analytics and data management.