Immuta: Ready to lead the DataOps revolution
A decade ago, someone said, "data is the new oil," and the analogy stuck.
Personally, we don't love the phrase because it doesn't take into account the enormity of the challenge involved in making all of this data useful to your organization. By now, people have started to realize that collecting data is the easy part - it's putting that data to productive use that is the really hard part.
Over the past decade, the hype around "big data" has matured into concerns about how to get enterprise data from ingest into a form that can readily be utilized. If AI, ML and the applications which rely on them are critical to every business going forward, and data is the "oxygen-carrying blood" which feeds them, then you simply cannot get this part of your infrastructure wrong and hope to be successful. In other words, we have a huge problem that organizations absolutely must get right. That is a recipe for a very big opportunity and why so many folks are talking about DataOps.
We made our first investment in Immuta in 2020, literally in the midst of the market downturn, because of our conviction that Immuta is poised to be a leader in DataOps. By automating and simplifying data access management, even in complex, hybrid environments, Immuta becomes the gateway through which enterprises can realize real value from their data.
Just like DevOps, DataOps is changing everything.
Those trying to realize value from their data face some very similar challenges which impacted developers as they migrated applications from on-prem to the cloud. Instead of just residing in a single database, data today sits in many places, including a mix of on-prem and cloud data sets. With the growing amount of distributed data, the function of Data Engineering has emerged to handle the challenges of making sure the necessary data is available to users to analyze.
But data analysis presents its own challenges. Data not only needs to be prepared using a uniform schema, it also needs to be fresh and high-quality. Firms also must know where data came from to ensure their data processes are compliant with regulations and usage policies.
The issues facing data engineers are only getting more complex. Data locality and privacy rules are emerging quickly and vary from region to region. Further, data users require unique permissions to enable them only to access data suitable to their role.
The complexity and constantly changing environment make getting data to a state where it can be used a long and manual process, often involving spreadsheets of complex interdependencies. It is not unusual today for a large enterprise data science team to wait up to six months to be able to access data after making a request. Accordingly, firms that don't make it a core competency to streamline data access will increasingly find themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
Immuta's approach removes the friction.
Immuta's data access control platform removes this friction and helps enterprises solve these daunting challenges by automating the process and putting subject matter experts in control.
Immuta creates metadata which understands the policies in place as well as the underlying data's characteristics. And combined with a common abstraction layer above multiple operating environments, Immuta's customers can build secure and compliant policies right into the data flow. Given the critical role Immuta plays in helping customers unlock the value of their data, we believe the company will become a large category leader in DataOps.
Finding the right team to lean into the opportunity is key.
Of course, having a great product and large market opportunity are necessary but insufficient to achieve success. You also need great leadership, and Immuta's CEO, Matt Carroll, immediately impressed us. His depth of understanding and passion for the problem were evident given his role in helping the Intelligence Community solve the same data access challenges enterprises are tackling today. Further, Matt is a compelling communicator and highly driven yet disciplined operator who conducts himself with complete integrity. He and his leadership team have laid out a compelling vision that we feel is unmatched. While the recent Series D funding is a testament to the strong foundation they've built, we know this team has much bigger plans ahead, and we're extremely grateful and excited to partner with them.
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