Secoda Product News - March 2025

For years, governance was treated as an afterthought - something organizations handled reactively just to check compliance boxes. It was often siloed in legal or compliance teams, seen as bureaucracy that slowed things down, and rarely tied to immediate business outcomes. Without a clear ROI or broader visibility into the risks, it was easy to deprioritize.

That’s no longer the case.

Today, governance is critical for AI and analytics. Organizations that don’t get it right struggle with incomplete, inaccurate, and unverified data. And as AI adoption accelerates, those challenges only multiply.

Many organizations have invested heavily in data infrastructure, yet governance remains fragmented. Teams are forced to manage security policies across a maze of disconnected tools like BI platforms, classification systems, observability solutions, access management systems, etc. Each additional tool adds another layer of complexity, slowing decisions and increasing security risks.

At Secoda, we believe governance should be seamless, automated, and built for AI readiness. Most modern data solutions today create more friction than they solve, leaving teams with disconnected tools and reactive processes. That's why I'm excited to introduce two new features designed to unify governance with Secoda: Policies and Access Requests.

First, we're launching Policies as a new way for teams to enforce governance on their data resources. In Secoda, a policy is a set of rules that define the conditions data resources must meet to stay compliant. For example, a policy might require an owner to be assigned to any production table that contains PII. If a resource does not meet the defined conditions, it is flagged for remediation.

Many organizations today rely on static documents, outdated spreadsheets, or legacy tools that are hard to maintain and only accessible to a few people. These systems create bottlenecks that make it difficult to keep governance policies up to date or enforce them consistently.

Secoda eliminates this friction by embedding policies directly into the platform, making them easy for admins to set up, maintain, and apply across the organization. They are dynamic, auditable, and can be built from templates aligned to standards such as GDPR, ISO27001, and HIPAA. Teams can customize policies to reflect their internal requirements and data stack, reducing manual work while staying compliant at scale.

Second, Access Requests is now available to all Secoda users, making it simpler for teams to request, approve, and track access to data resources. Secoda centralizes these requests and automatically updates permissions at the source. Whether it's Snowflake, Postgres, or BigQuery, access is granted and revoked exactly where the data lives. When users discover data they need but can't access, they can specify their intended duration and use case. Once approved, access is provisioned automatically and rolled back after expiration. This ensures a complete audit trail, improves security, and reduces data exposure risks without slowing teams down.

Policies define the rules for compliance and governance, and Access Requests ensure that the right stakeholders have access to the right data. Instead of managing access through manual processes, organizations can now centralize and scale governance with Secoda. In this new generation, governance no longer slows teams down. It ensures the right people have the right access at the right time, reducing security risks while keeping workflows fast and frictionless.

The feedback from our users so far has been immediate and overwhelmingly positive. One Secoda customer, one of Europe's top providers of renewable energy and gas, was previously managing access requests manually through a tangle of Slack messages and emails. While they followed strict security guidelines, scattered approvals led to delays, inconsistencies, and security risks. Without clear policies in place, decisions varied across teams, making audits a challenge. With Secoda’s Access Requests, they streamlined approvals, enforced governance policies automatically, and simplified audits.

We can’t wait for more customers to try this out and see the impact firsthand.

These updates are just one step in our broader vision of making governance effortless. At the Data Leaders Forum Product Keynote on April 9, we’ll be sharing more on how Secoda is evolving to support the next generation of AI and analytics.

If you want to see what unified governance looks like in action, I invite you to register today.

Until next time,
Etai Mizrahi