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Zachary Friedman, associate director of product management at Immuta, on security in the modern data stack

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Zachary Friedman, associate director of product management at data governance solutions provider Immuta, shares his thoughts on the data security, privacy, and governance market. The interview covers the history of data governance, Immuta’s customers and revenue drivers, implementation, and third-party integrations. He also discusses the transformation of the industry in recent years, Immuta’s backers, how the company differs from the competition, and his ideal growth scenario.

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The following interview was conducted by Sacra—June 2023

Background

Zachary Friedman is the associate director of product management at Immuta. In our chat with Zachary, we discussed the taxonomy of the cybersecurity, data security and data governance markets, looked the competitive positioning of companies like Immuta, BigID, Privitar, and others, and explored how regulatory changes and the growing need for data privacy are influencing strategies and decisions in the data security industry.

Questions

  1. Can you give us a brief history of data governance as you see it? What did the world look like before Immuta and what does it look like after?
  2. Who is Immuta's customer? What prompts them to buy?
  3. For the customer, is Immuta a revenue driver in that it gives companies trust when they’re trying to close big enterprise deals? Or is it more about de-risking security breaches and data leaks? Is it more revenue driver or de-risker or both?
  4. Who in the org buys and who implements? What does an implementation look like? How does the customer measure success?
  5. You mentioned that Immuta ties together employee identity with your data store and maps these policies for who can access what. How does that typically work? Do people connect their Okta and their data store and then set this up in Immuta?
  6. Can you talk about the depth of integration Immuta has into different data stores? Does the depth of integration differ if it's a first-party integration where they're an investor like an Okta, Snowflake or Databricks vs. a third-party integration?
  7. Immuta existed before the modern data stack, and you indicated that there was this moment or time when the modern data stack started to be a big driver. What, if anything, changed? Did it change this notion from an individual's access to data to more aggregated metrics across all the tables that you have access to or not? Did it also give rise to this new type of end-user who was not just accessing tables but also generating metrics across the data?
  8. A lot of the highest-flying private companies are in what you might generically call cybersecurity. What are the tailwinds driving cybersecurity generally, and is it a big tailwind behind Immuta? How else would you taxonomize the things that are tailwinds propelling Immuta?
  9. You mentioned Wiz, and then there's a few other companies that feel either adjacent or competitive like Rubrik and BigID. A lot of them use terms like data visibility, data control, and data access to describe what they do. Can you talk about some of these subcategories, where they overlap, and where they butt up against each other?
  10. A lot of the core of Immuta seems to be protecting data, but internally, versus a product like BigID, which is maybe more focused on protecting data in the abstract. Is that accurate?
  11. Rubrik crossed over into cybersecurity, but they were initially focused on data apps and data recovery. Part of doing that is securing the data. That seems to maybe create overlap with a product like Immuta. Do you in general see more companies crossing over into cybersecurity and having some overlap with a company like Immuta and what's your take on that?
  12. Snowflake and Databricks are investors in Immuta, but Immuta also helps unlock more data for them—it’s a revenue driver for them. Does the fact that you're a partner, and you also drive more revenue for them, and you both have these products around data access, create a threat that they can become a frenemy and try to build a more integrated platform that eats up the Immuta use case? What makes it such that Immuta necessarily needs to be separate, or is there such a dynamic at all?
  13. Over the near-term time horizon—let’s say 5 years—do you see Immuta adding more products, or do you see enabling more data or adding more seats as the main driver of growth? If everything goes right for Immuta, what has it become in some more abstract sense and how has the world changed as a result?

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