What is Distributed Stewardship
Distributed stewardship is an approach to data policy management that delegates responsibility to the stakeholders who understand the full business context that informs data access requests.
Data policies created in plain language
Author and manage data access policies in plain language without requiring specialized engineering resources. Policies can also be managed as code to streamline deployment processes in modern data stacks. With Immuta, customers have reduced policy management burden by 75X.
Distributed management responsibility
Flexible and easy-to-use interfaces enable distributed data policy and access management. Data infrastructure teams oversee the Immuta deployment and empower lines of business stakeholders, who are closest to the business context for data access requests, with self-service policy management. This has allowed Immuta customers to accelerate time to data access by 100X.
Easy for any stakeholder to understand data access
Authoring policies in plan language empowers security and governance stakeholders to understand how data is protected across the modern data stack, without specialized engineering resources.
Accelerate Time to Data
Scale data access management with powerful plain language policies that enable self-service management for business and technical stakeholders who have business context over data access requests.
Increase Data Sharing
Line of business stakeholders can easily control and understand how data is being shared and used based on domain-specific rules. This encourages data sharing across business lines and with third parties, since business or technical stakeholders can manage access.
Remove Engineering Bottlenecks
Distributed ownership of data policy management by those who have business context over data use removes engineering bottleneck and manual work. Engineering resources can instead focus on data product delivery of data products.
What is data democratization by definition?
At a core level, the definition of data democratization is making data accessible to all potential data users throughout an organization. This means that the data collected and stored by an organization can be accessed, queried, and utilized by any stakeholder who needs it. One large caveat, however, is that this data needs to be effectively controlled and secured so that these users are only seeing what they have the need–and the right–to see. So while data democratization enhances data’s use, it needs to be done in a secure and managed way.
What is fine-grained authorization and why is it important for data use?
Fine-grained authorization, also known as fine-grained access control, is a more nuanced and variable method of controlling and determining access to data. Usually used in cloud computing where large numbers of data sources are stored together, fine-grained authorization assigns specified access policies for each item of data in the system. These policies can be based on criteria like 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.
Who should own data governance programs?
There is no universal answer for who should own data governance programs at a given organization, as each company will have its own internal structure, goals, and level of data maturity. However, it is often a best practice to assign the responsibility of data governance to a role that will be closely tied in to both your data and security initiatives. This said, many organizations place the Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Chief Information Officer (CIO), Chief Data Officer (CDO), or Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) in charge of data governance. By doing this, teams align their data security requirements with the actions of those who are most closely affiliated with this valuable resource.
What are the key access control roles and responsibilities?
In an access control model, policies are often built and enforced based on users’ access control roles and responsibilities. Whether this leads to the creation of a role-based access control (RBAC) model or a more dynamic attribute-based access control (ABAC) or purpose-based access control (PBAC) model, these roles and responsibilities are crucial to understanding who in your organization will be able to access which data and for what reason(s). These provide the context necessary to build access policies and control frameworks upon, keeping your data limited to those who truly require access for their roles.
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