Information powers your organization. It identifies trends, helps you serve customers, enables smarter decisions, fulfills compliance obligations, and fuels innovation. It can also put your company at risk.
Waident held a cybersecurity event several years ago. The moderator opened the event with an analogy that spoke to me about the importance of protecting data. He said, “Imagine someone at a company takes a wad of cash, say $10,000, leaves it on a table in a public location, walks away, and assumes that the money will still be there next week. No reasonable person would ever do that, but companies do this all the time with their data.” Their data is one of the most valuable assets, yet they neglect common sense security and let any hacker steal it.
This is why data access plays a crucial role. In this blog post, I delve into what data access is, why it is important, who owns it, and how to balance best practices with business trade-offs.
What is Data Access
Data access refers to one’s ability to retrieve, manipulate, and use data stored within an organization’s systems. It establishes the appropriate permissions and rights to users or systems to access specific data from sales to HR to marketing to finance. Data access evolves the technical aspects, such as database queries, and the policies, procedures, and governance regarding data availability.
Who is Responsible for Data Access
Ultimately, the business has ownership and responsibility for data access but determining who can use the organization’s data should be a collaborative effort across different roles within an organization. The major players in setting and managing data access include:
- Data Governance: Data governance teams are responsible for defining and enforcing data access policies, ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements, and managing data access permissions. They play a crucial role in maintaining data integrity, security, and privacy.
- IT: IT departments are responsible for implementing the technical infrastructure and systems that enable data access. They manage databases, data warehouses, and associated technologies to ensure data availability, reliability, and performance.
- Business Units and Users: Business units and individual users have the responsibility of understanding and adhering to data access policies and guidelines. They need to request appropriate access rights, use data responsibly, and report any data access issues or concerns.
What are the Best Practices for Managing Data Access
Determining practices regarding who, how, and when someone can access information can be a challenge. In my experience, if the determination was left up to IT, the lawyers, or risk management, no one would have access to the information. As a business guy, I know that is not realistic. Implementing stringent access controls may enhance security but could hinder usability, customer experience, and productivity. Finding the right equilibrium is essential.
Depending on the size and scope, implementing robust data access controls can increase costs in infrastructure, training, and maintenance. Carefully assess the cost-benefit ratio to optimize your investments. Finally, sometimes organizations do not have a choice about data access because they must comply with industry-specific regulations, such as GDPR or HIPAA. Your policies should align with your regulator’s requirements to avoid penalties and reputational damage.
With those considerations in mind, here are some key steps you can take to develop an effective approach to managing access to your data.
- Define Access Policies and Roles: Establish clear policies and guidelines by outlining who can access what data, under what conditions, and for what purposes. Create role-based access policies and controls to ensure data is accessible to the right people based on their roles and responsibilities. Adopt Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to manage data access rights efficiently. Assign users to specific roles with predefined permissions.
- Implement Data Classification: Classify data based on its sensitivity and criticality to determine the appropriate level of access controls. For example, categorize data into public, internal, confidential, and restricted levels, and apply access restrictions accordingly.
- Conduct Regular Access Reviews: Review the access rights align with current user roles and responsibilities. Remove or modify access permissions for users who no longer require them or no longer with the company.
- Data Encryption and Masking: Implement data encryption and masking techniques to protect sensitive information during transmission and storage. This ensures that even if unauthorized access occurs that the data remains secure and unusable.
- Monitoring and Auditing: Implement robust monitoring and auditing mechanisms to track data access activities, detect anomalies, and investigate any suspicious activities. This helps maintain data integrity, security, and regulatory compliance.
- User Training and Awareness: Provide comprehensive training and awareness programs to educate users about data access policies, best practices, and the importance of data security. Foster a culture of responsible data access and usage throughout the organization.
Conclusion
Data access is the key to unlocking the value of organizational data. By collaboratively defining ownership and responsibility and implementing best practices, organizations can ensure efficient and secure data access that empowers the enterprise not hinder it.
Extra Credit:
How to protect Small Business with NIST Framework: https://www.waident.com/how-to-protect-small-businesses-with-nist-cyber-security-framework/
Learn about data loss prevention: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/dlp-learn-about-dlp?view=o365-worldwide
