Universal Cloud Data Access Control

Data Access Control

Frequently Asked Questions

• What is data access control and why is it important?

  Data access control refers to selectively restricting access to data so as to protect the privacy and security of the data subject, and ensure ethical data use. This is accomplished by setting parameters for who can access what types of data and dynamically enforcing controls to meet those parameters.

  With organizations collecting, storing, and using sensitive data more than ever before, data access control is now critical for all organizations that rely on data for analytics and decision making. Data use — especially sensitive data use — is increasingly regulated by federal legislation, data use agreements and contracts, industry guidelines, and internal rules, among others; ensuring its compliant use is necessary to avoid data leaks and breaches that could result in fines, legal action, and loss of reputation. Without data access control, organizations have no way of monitoring who is accessing what data, when, and for what purpose, jeopardizing the data’s security and privacy.

• What is fine-grained access control?

  Fine-grained access control is a method of controlling who can access certain data by giving each piece of information its own access criteria. These criteria can be based on a number of specific factors, including the role of the person requesting access and the intended action upon the data. For example, one individual may be given access to edit and make changes to a piece of data, while another might be given access only to read the data without making any changes.

  Fine-grained access control is particularly important for organizations that store large amounts of data together in the cloud since it allows data to be stored in the same place without risking security and compliance.

• What’s the difference between RBAC, ABAC, and PBAC?

  Role-based access control (RBAC) grants data access to users based on their role or function within the organization. This type of access control works for small organizations with few data sets and data users, but as roles, users, and rules change, data teams are forced to create new roles to accommodate organizational evolutions. As a result, a system may contain hundreds or thousands of roles that are difficult to manage and scale as organizations grow, which can lead to increased risk of data leaks and breaches.

  Attribute-based access control (ABAC) is an approach to data security that permits or restricts data access based on assigned user, object, action, and environmental attributes. In contrast to RBAC, ABAC has multiple dimensions on which to apply access controls. This makes attribute-based access control a highly dynamic model because policies, users, and objects can be provisioned independently, and policies make access control decisions when the data is requested.

  Purpose-based access control (PBAC) applies regulation-based restrictions to sensitive personal data, as detected by automated sensitive data discovery tagging. When combined with data masking tools, this reinforces confidence that the right people are accessing the right data at the right time, and for appropriate purposes. For regulatory compliance and data audit trails, this level of control is particularly powerful and critical for ensuring data is adequately protected and reportable to legal and compliance teams.

• What are the four types of access control?

  The four main types of access control are discretionary, mandatory, role-based, and attribute-based. With discretionary access control (DAC), users create rules to determine who has access to the data through access control lists (ACLs) and capabilities tables. Mandatory access control (MAC), often regarded as the strictest type, takes a hierarchical approach to data access in which a systems admin regulates data access based on varying security clearance levels, and is widely used in the government and military. Role-based access control (RBAC) depends on a systems admin to grant access permissions based on a user’s role within the organization. Unlike RBAC, attribute-based access control (ABAC), enables data access based on attributes of the user, object, action, and environment, creating a dynamic system that vastly reduces the number of policies needed to enforce access control and avoids the need to create new roles for all changes to a data environment.

• Why is there a need for data access control?

  The ability to store large amounts of information together is a substantial competitive advantage. However, this data can vary in terms of type, source, and security level. With organizations accelerating movement to the cloud and adopting multiple cloud data platforms, it’s imperative to maintain control over who can access what data and for what purpose. Without data access control to dictate that, organizations run the risk of experiencing data leaks, breaches, and otherwise unauthorized access that can be costly from a monetary standpoint — in the form of penalties for violating data use rules and regulations — as well as from a privacy standpoint, as data subjects’ personal information and proprietary business data may be exposed.Before the onset of cloud data use, when data types could be stored in separate locations with access dictated according to those locations, coarse-grained access controls worked sufficiently. But, as data is increasingly co-located in the cloud and use cases expand, fine-grained access control is essential to enable data use without running into security or compliance issues.

• What is the strictest access control model?

  Mandatory Access Control (MAC) is considered the strictest access control model. Primarily used by the government and military, this form of access control takes a hierarchical approach to regulating data access. Security labels, denoting both classification and category, are placed on the available resources by system admins and cannot be changed by any other users. The same labels are attributed to the system’s users, so only those with the proper security credentials are able to access certain resources within the system.