Onboarding Recommendation: Start with Par Value

In golf, par represents “the number of strokes an expert golfer is expected to need to complete a hole or round.” It’s the expected performance of a skilled player operating at their best.

Onboarding Immuta works the same way. To ensure success, we focus on hitting a predictable, achievable target—what we call Par Value. This means setting up essential integrations, aligning user and data metadata, and supporting governance change management.

While fast results are important, complex use cases require a strong foundation. Immuta helps your team build that foundation efficiently, so you’re ready to scale.

The complexity of onboarding

Reaching Par Value can feel challenging, especially if you're using on-premises infrastructure or managing multiple environments. Your first priority is to get Immuta operational: complete integrations, establish data workflows, and align your team around clear goals. Once Immuta is live, your focus shifts to building the foundation for policies.

At this stage, you may still need to refine user attributes, data tags, and other metadata required for scalable access controls. If you're working across DEV, TEST, and PROD environments, you’ll likely repeat some steps in each one.

To support this work, you’ll begin policy workshops that help structure tags and shape your approach to attribute-based access control (ABAC). Technical and process challenges are expected, and Immuta works with you to address them early—ensuring you're set up for a successful transition to automation.

This phase is highly technical and can feel overwhelming. It’s easy to get excited about using all of Immuta’s capabilities, but moving too fast—without a solid foundation, change management, testing, and automation planning—can lead to setbacks. Starting with manual steps and validating them first ensures that when you do automate, it’s done right. Most teams are early in their governance journey, and our goal is to help you move forward efficiently, starting with the basics.

Taking the time to build this foundation ensures you can scale governance with confidence and minimal disruption.

What is par value?

Par Value means your Immuta environment is fully integrated in production, enforcing existing policies, and ready for automation.

At this stage, you’re not changing your governance outcomes, you’re improving how you achieve them. Tasks like managing table-level access or masking sensitive data were often handled manually by IT before Immuta. With Immuta, these controls are automated and scale easily as your data and user needs grow.

You maintain secure, compliant access to data, but the process is more efficient, flexible, and easier to manage over time.

Par value: a real-world example

To illustrate what reaching Par Value looks like in practice, let’s look at how one healthcare organization approached onboarding.

They had been managing confidential data manually, creating additional tables and views for access needs. Onboarding a new customer required creating multiple views and manually mapping each to an Active Directory (AD) group—a process that often took over six weeks per new customer.

While they had mastered this process, they wanted to advance further, incorporating masking and other governance use cases. Rather than immediately implementing new features, we recommended reaching Par Value first. By improving an existing process—onboarding and protecting confidential data—they transitioned smoothly to Immuta without overwhelming their team.

To support this transition, they focused on the following change management steps:

• Direct users to existing tables instead of creating new views

• Use group attributes to manage customer IDs in governance policies

• Align teams on key governance workflows

• Plan for future use cases, like conditional masking for aggregation

• Transition governance responsibilities from IT to data owners and stewards

In this case, the change management process took several months and required multiple sessions with key stakeholders. However, once Immuta was fully integrated, the team had a solid foundation to scale their governance and take on more complex use cases confidently.

Solving change management first

Achieving Par Value offers a controlled way to evolve your governance process without changing outcomes. This is critical because data governance spans multiple workflows, teams, and departments—so any major changes often face resistance and friction.

By keeping outcomes stable and improving how they’re delivered, you can fine-tune workflows, integrations, and policies without political friction or delays. Par Value gives your team the opportunity to implement governance solutions that solve familiar problems, so you can build trust in Immuta before tackling more advanced use cases.

Conclusion

When implementing Immuta, the goal isn’t to boil the ocean with complex new use cases right away. It’s about getting Immuta live, enforcing the policies you already use, and building a strong foundation to grow from. Taking on too much too soon can slow progress and overwhelm your team.

Par Value brings you to a familiar, scalable baseline. It reduces time to data access while empowering your team to build new skills. That foundation enables long-term success so you can realize the full value of Immuta’s data governance capabilities.

The key value of Par Value? Faster, more efficient access to data—without overwhelming your team.