ManoMano, founded in 2013, is a European marketplace in the DIY, garden, and home furniture sector with 500 employees, over 7 million active users, and $700M in funding raised. Based in France, ManoMano connects consumers with sellers across Europe.
Challenge
ManoMano faced three critical data security and governance challenges:
- Lack of End-to-End Observability: Fragmented tools like Metabase made it impossible to gain a unified view of data consumption and access patterns across the organization.
- Inconsistent Access Controls: Decentralized platform management led to inconsistent access controls, creating gaps in security coverage.
- No Granular Column-Level Controls: Inability to enforce granular column-level controls without manual processes, leaving sensitive data exposed.
Solution
ManoMano selected Formal for its comprehensive capabilities and deployed it via the Terraform provider, delivering unified data consumption visibility.
Enhanced Data Access Visibility
Formal's Proxy provided full visibility into data access patterns across Metabase, Snowflake, and Postgres -- giving the team a single pane of glass for all data interactions.
Accessible Platform for Non-Technical Users
The platform enabled non-technical users to manage data labeling, reducing the burden on engineering teams and democratizing data governance.
Security As Code
Using the Terraform provider and Open Policy Agent engine, ManoMano implemented security as code, ensuring consistent and auditable policy enforcement across all data stores.
"Formal's platform integration was seamless and provided us with the end-to-end observability we desperately needed."
— Cyrielle Camanes, Site Reliability Engineering 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."
— Nicoleta Iordachi, Data Platform Manager at ManoMano
"Implementing Formal was a game-changer for our data management strategy. The ability to seamlessly integrate and gain deep insights into our data consumption significantly improves our user management."
— Nicoleta Iordachi, Data Platform Manager at ManoMano
Results
- Identified former employees with active Metabase jobs -- uncovered security risks from stale accounts that still had active queries running
- Zero disruption to end-users -- Formal deployment remained completely invisible to end-users, ensuring no workflow interruptions
- Enforced policies on Okta groups across all data access -- unified policy enforcement tied to identity provider groups for consistent security posture
Platforms and Integrations
- Metabase -- BI and analytics tool secured through Formal's proxy
- Snowflake -- cloud data warehouse with Formal-managed access controls
- Postgres -- relational databases governed by Formal's policy engine
- Terraform -- infrastructure-as-code deployment of Formal configuration
- Okta -- identity provider integration for group-based policy enforcement
- Open Policy Agent -- policy engine for security-as-code enforcement