Why Use Project Equalization?

Let’s say Sally and Bob are working together on a project, and Sally has more data access than Bob. She can see PII and Bob cannot, but they both can see credit card numbers. Without Immuta, an admin would have to know what tables they intend to use, scrub all those tables of PII, and then give Sally and Bob access to those new tables in a place where they can safely work on the data and save any output they create.

With Immuta, this is a lot easier. Sally or Bob could create the project, add the tables as data sources, invite the other person to be a project member, and equalize it. The equalization will compare the members of the project to the data policies on the tables in the project and find the intersection: Sally and Bob both can see credit card numbers. That intersection becomes the equalization setting. Once the project is equalized in this example, Sally will lose access to PII, but both Sally and Bob will retain access to credit card numbers.

Now Sally and Bob want to do some transformation on the data and write it somewhere. This is where project workspaces come into play. Once workspaces are configured in a Snowflake or Databricks integration, Immuta will create a schema in the native database dedicated to this project where Sally and Bob can write their output. Within this workspace

• Only members of the project will have access to that schema to write to or read from. (For example, in Snowflake Immuta limits it to a particular role it creates in Snowflake.) This is important, because if someone who can’t see credit card numbers somehow had access to where Sally and Bob were writing, they would gain access to data (the credit card numbers) they shouldn’t see.
• They will only be able to access the tables that are in the project. (This may be critical if someone approved the purpose for only those tables.)

When determining where you should give analysts WRITE access, you need to consider the entire universe of where they have READ access, and that universe is constantly changing. This is an impossible proposition for you to manage without Immuta projects.

Key takeaways

• Users at different levels of access can work together without help from an admin (to scrub the data).
• Customers can avoid data leaks on analyst writes.