Recent laws that protect consumer privacy have forced companies to rethink how they share and use the data they collect. Founded by members of the U.S. intelligence community, the startup Immuta Inc. is growing by providing data-governance solutions for customers in the financial, healthcare, government, and manufacturing industries.

“With the advent of privacy regulations, our goal was to bring a product to the market that makes it easy to govern access to data,” said Steve Touw (pictured, left), co-founder and chief technology officer at Immuta. “This in a way that you don’t have to be technical to do it, you don’t have to be a system administrator.”

Touw and Rob Lancaster (pictured, right), general manager of cloud at Immuta, spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and John Walls (@JohnWalls21), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. They discussed the new regulatory scenario for data processing, Immuta’s participation in this market, and how its software has helped, for example, financial institutions. (* Disclosure below.)

Bringing together data users and owners

In addition to rules such as the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe or recently enacted privacy controls in the U.S., increasing public awareness of the possible commercial use of their sensitive information is driving demand for data-governance services.

“It is kind of a Facebook-effect,” Lancaster said. “Cambridge Analytica has created this awareness within the general population for what organizations are actually doing with their data.”

To help companies make legal and ethical use of data, Immuta links three important groups of people in this process: the users, who want to get access to the data; the legal compliance team, which needs to understand how the rules are being enforced or even enforce them; and the data owners, who need to expose the data.

“Usually those three personas are at odds with one another,” Touw pointed out. “We bring them together in our platform and allow them to work together in a way that’s compliant and also accelerates their data analytics.”

Some of Immuta’s customers are financial institution that use the startup service for all their trading data, according to Touw. “We manage all that dynamically,” he said. “We’re able to do anonymization techniques. We can make numeric data less specific. We can use techniques like k-anonymization that allows analysts to analyze the data but ensures that small groups that exist in that data won’t reveal someone’s true identity.”

To make the data governance efficient even for multicloud enterprises, Immuta is heterogeneous in terms of the environment it supports, Lancaster explained. It can run its software on-premises, as well as on any cloud service, effectively dealing with any popular database system or analytical tool.

“Think of us as a data abstraction layer across a hybrid environment,” he said. “We’re working very deeply with AWS field teams, particularly around some of their verticals — the verticals that align to our business.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS re:Invent event. (* Disclosure: Immuta Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Immuta nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE