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Access Control

You Have Data, But Is It Accessible?

|Chief Scientist
As the saying goes, “data is the new oil,” as it is quickly becoming an essential resource creating new revenue streams across the global economy, disrupting business operations, removing human bias from the equation, and ensuring the smooth functioning of companies of all sizes. Like with oil, those who learn to extract data and put it to good use will thrive while those who do not will be left behind. This article will dive into why it is insufficient to only store data. Instead it is crucial to  make sense of it and tap into this precious reservoir of opportunities for your enterprise’s growth.

 

What Is Data Accessibility?

The concept of data accessibility refers to removing barriers that stand in the way of leveraging the data stored in a company’s database. In other words, data accessibility determines how data consumers in your organization can utilize data to increase productivity and efficiency without needing extensive experience in working with data. ACME software solutions can enable any user to access relevant data, obtain vital insights, and make better, knowledge-powered decisions in their work. However, matters are not always this simple, as harnessing value out of data can be very difficult for many companies.   

The State of Data Accessibility in 2021

A 2016 Forrester study found that 74% of companies claim they want to be data-driven, but only 29% succeed at turning analytics into action. Though many would assume that things now look drastically different in 2021, a NewVantage Partners report involving 85 Fortune 1000 and industry-leading companies in retail, financial services, life sciences, and healthcare demonstrates that even very large players are still struggling with harnessing data to drive innovation, despite making investments greater than $50M. A few key statistics shed light on this gap:
  • 29.2% of companies report achieving transformational business outcomes
  • 30% of companies report having developed a well-articulated data strategy
  • 39.3% are managing data as a business asset
  • 24.0% have created a data-driven organization
  • 24.4% have forged a data culture

Three Reasons Why Companies Fail to Achieve  Data Accessibility

Today, with widespread proliferation of data sources, expanding tools and technologies, and growing sophistication of business users, the potential to unlock value in data-driven insights is higher than ever. Yet most companies still fail to connect data investments to business insights and results due to outdated methods of data mastery, lack of automated workflows, and even budget constraints.  

1. Data accessing and processing takes too much time and effort

Surveys show that data scientists spend 45% of their time performing data loading and cleaning tasks, which, while a very large percentage, is an improvement from the 70-80% catalogued in older reports. Despite improvements it is still deemed a Sisyphean task.  By gaining access to structured, organized, and curated data, companies can boost efficiency and simplify the data analysts and scientists’ missions, allowing them to focus on interpreting and translating it into actionable insights.   

2. Compliance issues slow down data accessing and processing

Data analysts and scientists’ efforts to access specific data are often halted by security and compliance issues. For example, processing sensitive data under GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and other privacy and security regulations require anonymization, security policy setting, and precious data engineering time. This process may include setting requirements, implementing them on different data platforms, and sometimes also writing specific views or spanning up new ETL/ELT processes.   

3. Your data isn’t accessible where it’s needed

This inaccessibility can lead your teams to waste a lot of time and performance quality because they lack quick access to information that could make all the difference. This type of issue stems from data silos—data categories that are accessible by one department but completely isolated from the rest of the organization, even if the data could be better used in other departments.  Let’s say that your digital marketing team is working on a social media campaign aimed at reaching your existing customers. While they contemplate clever ways to gather that sort of information, it normally simply already exists in your customer support database. A universal policy engine that automates granular access and controls across all data stores could quickly solve this issue.  

How Satori Helps Solve Data Accessibility Challenges

Organizations that aim to thrive in the ever-evolving digital landscape need to change their data accessibility, processing, and management approach. This is where Satori can help. Here are some ways companies can enhance their data accessibility by using Satori:  

Access to Sensitive Data Is No Longer a Nightmare

In many cases, sensitive data, such as information that contains PII or PHI, is of enormous value to the organization. However, due to the compliance and security challenges mentioned above, allowing access to such data becomes a challenge. To overcome this obstacle, you need to prepare specific anonymized copies, or data engineering teams can enable different fine-grained controls within the data infrastructure. These processes take time and reduce your data accessibility level. With Satori, you can define security policies that can be applied on your sensitive data without needing engineering implementations. Sensitive data is continuously discovered, and security policies can apply to it immediately. Such security policies can include fine-grained access control features such as dynamic masking, row-level security, and attribute-based access control (ABAC). This reduces your time-to-value from your data, while also keeping your data engineers productive, as they no longer need to micromanage security policies.  

Getting Access to Your Data 10x Faster

With Satori, data consumers can request access to data, and, according to the data access definitions, people can either be granted access after providing a business reason or obtain it following approval from a data owner or steward. This process can be executed without any efforts from data engineering teams and results in accelerating access to data and making it accessible.  

Compliance Can Become Fun

Ok, maybe not fun in a traditional sense per-se, but, with Satori, you get to be compliant in a very comfortable way. For example, requests such as: “I need a report of all users who were accessing sensitive data” or “I need a report with all new places where we have sensitive data” can be pulled from Satori in a matter of minutes. With the aforementioned capabilities, Satori streamlines data access and helps you provide data accessibility in a risk-free manner.  

Conclusion

Experts expect that, soon enough, data will become the core of every successful company’s business model, fueling the digital era of fact-based innovation and shaping a more efficient data-driven corporate culture.  Visions of increased customer satisfaction, streamlined operations, and elevated strategies are leading companies of all sizes to invest in analytical talent and cutting-edge technologies. However, there is still plenty of room for improvement by strengthening data accessibility. To learn more about how Satori can help you achieve better data accessibility, fill out the form below.
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About the author
|Chief Scientist

Ben is an experienced tech leader and book author with a background in endpoint security, analytics, and application & data security. Ben filled roles such as the CTO of Cynet, and Director of Threat Research at Imperva. Ben is the Chief Scientist for Satori, the DataSecOps platform.

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