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.
Policy-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.