Matillion, the leader in data productivity, chooses Expel for responsive, scalable, managed security

Matillion helps teams get data business-ready, faster—accelerating time-to-value and increasing the impact data can have. Thousands of enterprises—including Cisco, DocuSign, Pacific Life, Slack, and TUI—trust Matillion to load, transform, sync, and orchestrate their data for a wide range of use cases, from insights and operational analytics to data science, machine learning, and AI. Native integration with popular cloud data platforms lets data teams at every skill level automate management, refinement, and data delivery for every data integration need.

As Matillion’s customers increasingly adopted a cloud-first approach, the company’s security requirements evolved to handle more users, increasingly complex use cases, and larger cloud workloads. “We started out as a company that deployed software into customer infrastructure, which allowed us to expand very quickly, and also make sure that our customers had full data sovereignty,” explains Matillion Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Graeme Cantu-Park. “As customers migrated to SaaS applications, we had to continually evolve our strategy to protect new infrastructure that was available to attacks.”

Protecting data in the cloud is vital for Matillion—even more so because of the company’s rapid global expansion. Its growing roster of enterprise customers increasingly scrutinised Matillion’s own security defences.

“Enterprise customers demand rock-solid security and do much more due diligence,” Cantu-Park says. As a rapidly growing company with a powerful infrastructure spanning multiple countries, Matillion’s security requirements had become dramatically more sophisticated.

Central to all of these issues was the dizzying pace with which the threat landscape evolves. A commitment to detecting and countering the latest threat innovations was critical to Matillion’s information security standards.

As Cantu-Park notes, data integration is a massive addressable market for Matillion—and with data growing at an exponential rate, the company is well-positioned to win more customers, assuming their IT decision-makers had confidence in Matillion’s cloud security. That confidence, Cantu-Park believed, could be won with a managed services offering like Expel managed detection and response (MDR).

At the time that Matillion considered a new security provider, it had a small team of security experts and “capacity management was an absolute driver for the decision,” Cantu-Park says. In a previous role, he’d built a security operations team from scratch. “Building the security operation yourself is challenging to scale,” he says. “I wanted a responsive solution that could scale with our needs, that would integrate with the systems we had already, and give me 24×7 coverage.”

Cantu-Park expected to bring in technology that would stay ahead of the security curve. “It’s important that any security technology we bring on board evolves along with us,” he says. A cloud-native solution was also key. “Our platform runs on AWS,” he adds, “and it was really important that we had the ability to ingest AWS logs.”

Through contacts in the venture capital world, Cantu-Park learned of Expel MDR, which met all of his expectations for a managed solution to take on the heavy lifting of cloud security, while supporting the company as it innovated new features.

“Expel connects to our existing technology and is ready for the cloud. That was a huge selling point as well,” Cantu-Park says.

Expel provided the precise and effective security protections that Matillion customers and prospects demand—practically overnight.

“After a short proof of concept, it took about a day to get set up, then we rolled straight into the service,” he says. The speed made a difference in terms of Matillion obtaining its ISO certification shortly after the company began using Expel MDR. “Expel helped us achieve those certifications,” Cantu-Park says. “It’s a differentiator for us among other data integration vendors.”

Expel’s ease of integration with many endpoint security providers gives security teams the freedom to choose the best solutions for their tech stack, with no training needed for those new solutions. Cantu-Park didn’t have to re-architect, re-deploy, or re-integrate Matillion’s environment thanks to Expel’s integration strategy, saving time for the growing security team, which relies on Expel MDR to automate alerts and deliver only the most relevant and critical for review.

“We only see the alerts that matter,” Cantu-Park says. “We can get the alerts any way we want them.” He adds, “We end up with the optimal starting points, so we know what questions to ask. That means we reduce the time to resolution.”

Soon after Matillion deployed Expel MDR across their cloud, endpoint and Office applications, Expel announced support for Kubernetes (k8s) environments. “The timing of Expel offering support for Kubernetes was ideal. We just started to develop in Kubernetes when we learned Expel added support for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) ” says Andrew Waite, Cloud Security Lead at Matillion. “Expel’s integrations were on point when we started working with them, but we were curious to see how Expel would adapt as our own capabilities evolved. We were thrilled to see that Expel was in lockstep with our move into the Kubernetes space.”

Expel integrates Kubernetes environments into the Workbench platform, affording Matillion an easy decision. “We built trust with Expel. Kubernetes was new to us, but we understood how Expel worked, the alerting logic and the philosophy behind the platform, so ingesting Kubernetes data into the platform made sense.” As a result, Matillion’s cloud security team doesn’t need to be k8s experts to generate useful insights. This allows the security team to have more meaningful conversations with the company’s developers.

• Access to the latest security innovations
• Integrations with many endpoints for more visibility
• Saves time for the growing security team to focus beyond detection and response
• Rapid onboarding allowing immediate service delivery
• Automation that streamlines visibility to the alerts that matter

As Matillion adds companies around the world to its customer roster, the quality of its cloud security is helping to close deals. “Expel helps us foster growth by reducing friction in sales,” Cantu-Park says.

Matillion is also benefiting from Expel MDR’s innovation, another key pillar for Cantu-Park. Because Matillion has quickly recognised the value of Expel MDR, the company has become a design partner to help influence Expel’s forthcoming innovations. “We want the bleeding edge of technology in our managed security services and we get that with Expel,” Cantu-Park says.

The partnership between Matillion and Expel is also an excellent matchup in terms of values and culture. “We’re a value-driven company, and we have been since the very beginning,” Cantu-Park says. “We don’t just stick the value statement on the wall—we practise care, integrity, and we’re customer-obsessed on a daily basis, just like Expel. We know that we can’t do security poorly and also live by those values.”