How do you become data-driven? It’s a question that seemingly has infinite answers. That’s why many companies flounder in the ambiguity of data-driven initiatives absent of concrete, actionable focus areas. Forward-thinking leaders are strategically focused on a particular data-driven initiative — self-service data access and governance.

But even for companies who’ve succeeded in pinpointing the core data-driven initiative of self-service data sharing, creating a plan and implementing it is exponentially easier said than done. Why? The dual mandate. It’s about much more than just collecting, storing, and processing data. IT, security, and privacy teams need to provide fast, agile data access to reduce time to insights while maintaining compliance and regulatory requirements. So, how do architects achieve and maintain the right balance of security and speed? How do they empower analytic and data science teams with safe and timely access to insights? Swing the pendulum too far to one side — opening the data floodgates to give teams data as fast as possible — or too far to the other side — locking data down with overly stringent policies — leads to severe business, security, and compliance consequences. What’s the key to the speed-security balance?

Balancing data democratization with security, privacy, and compliance

The key to successfully meeting the dual mandate of agile and secure data access is comprehensive, enterprise-wide data governance. 

Escalating privacy regulations plus evolving consumer preferences, on top of internal security requirements, leave little room for error in an organization’s responsible data usage. In the face of increasingly tough compliance regulations, the default approach for IT and security teams has been a tight lockdown of data to ensure compliance and security. Without an enterprise-wide, centralized system of accountability, privacy and security teams often deny access to personally identifiable information (PII) and other sensitive data. This lack of analytical agility is a major blocker to becoming data-driven and a significant, growing source of friction between teams since business users, data scientists, and analysts demand rapid access to a wide swath of data.

Then there’s the challenge of the expanding, diverse, and hybrid multi-service and multi-cloud data estate requiring management and data access policies. 

Unified data security and access governance

Savvy organizations have had an epiphany. They realize data access governance must be one of the top disciplines they need to master for compliant data at scale. Most enterprises have some form of data access governance in action, and those with automated execution have separated themselves from the pack. From onboarding new data or new users to a 1,000-fold reduction in the number of policies, enterprises that automate reap massive cost savings and operational efficiencies.

Unified data access governance grants a singular experience for creating, managing, enforcing, and executing policies. This unified approach is essential to modernizing data architectures, meeting increasingly stringent regulations, enhancing operational efficiency, and keeping data flowing with secure agility. 

So, what are the critical elements of a unified data security platform?

• Universal data coverage: Create policies centrally. Consistently and natively enforce those policies to reduce complexity across hybrid cloud multi-service data estates. Build once, deploy everywhere.
• Transparent to end users: No impact to query performance and no need to make changes to end-user queries when leveraging native integration and enforcement of policies across diverse data services.
• Automated: Policies are automatically translated into data service-specific commands. Built-in approval workflows automate access requests and new policy creation.
• Based on open standards: Leverages the proven Apache Ranger architecture to provide the broadest range of pre-built integrations with structured and semi-structured data sources as well as identity management solutions.
• Future-proof: Easy to add new data sources. Built-in support for industry compliance and regulations.

Where to start your unified data security journey

Privacera is a Unified Data Security Platform founded by the creators of Apache Ranger and Apache Atlas. With build once, deploy anywhere capabilities, Privacera empowers enterprise users to holistically secure and protect data with consistent and native enforcement across hybrid cloud data estates. Privacera supports the entire lifecycle of data access and security governance with an automated solution that provides sensitive data discovery, fine-grained access control, distributed native policy enforcement, and extensive auditing and reporting. All delivered through a single pane of glass.

See for yourself why Fortune 100 enterprises trust Privacera’s unified data access governance — request a demo today.