Challenge
While ManoMano already had a security strategy for databases and data-warehouses such as Metabase, the solution for business reporting, troubleshooting, and alerting at Manomano introduced several challenges:
- Lack of end-to-end observability: Users were consuming data from fragmented tools like Metabase that did not provide observability to the end user or the data team.
- Lack of cross platform policy: Having a decentralized platform to manage data led to inconsistency of access controls across platforms.
- No granular control over their data: ManoMano needed to seamlessly enforce controls at column level but could not without introducing many manual processes.
Solution
ManoMano chose Formal for its comprehensive platform capabilities that was easily deployed through its Terraform provider. Formal’s platform provided ManoMano with a unified view of data consumption across their entire data stack, significantly enhancing security and operational efficiency.
Cyrielle Camanes, Site Reliability Engineering at ManoMano: “Formal’s platform integration was seamless and provided us with the end-to-end observability we desperately needed. It enabled us to identify and address data consumption issues that we were previously unaware of.”
Nicoleta Iordachi, Data Platform Manager at ManoMano: “The deployment of Formal was straightforward and had no impact on our existing workflows. The insights gained from Formal’s observability tools have been invaluable to improve our data governance and security posture.”
Key features of Formal included:
- Enhanced Data Access Visibility: Formal’s Proxy enables ManoMano’s data governance team to gain deep insights into how users consume data.
- Accessibility of the Platform: Ensuring non-technical folks can interact with the data and effectively manage the labeling of data.
- Security As Code: Formal provides a Terraform provider and leverages Open Policy Agent as its policy engine.
Results
The implementation of Formal at ManoMano has yielded significant results. Formal provided ManoMano with crucial insights, such as identifying employees who no longer worked at the company but still had running jobs on Metabase. This discovery enabled ManoMano to promptly address these security risks and improve their overall data governance.
Moreover, when deployed on Metabase, Formal’s presence was completely invisible to the end-users, ensuring no disruption to their activities and maintaining performance integrity.
Thanks to Formal’s OPA-powered policy Engine, Manomano could easily enforce policies on their Okta groups on any data access using Formal Terraform Provider.
