Data governance and data privacy have both become a central subject in today's discussions about enterprise IT. Tons of sensitive information is held in storage servers, and the organizations who control that data need to implement measures not only to protect that data, but to govern it.
With so much data at stake, it can be difficult to decide within an organization who gets to have access to this information. And even if there is an easy way to tell who is responsible to see the data and who isn’t, there may not be an easy way to enable that kind of role-based access.
In this blog we’ll take a closer look at the challenges of role-based access and show you how NetApp Cloud Data Sense’s new role-based access controls can help you define custom roles for using and viewing data at your organization.
Read on below as we cover:
Role-based access control (RBAC) is a method for restricting access to network resources based on the role a specific user. Based on this role, the user can access only information or resources in a network related to their participation in the organization.
For example, a network user could be granted the Admin role which would let the user perform configurations on all or specific network resources, such as a CRM system or a server. On the other hand, another user could be granted the end-user role, which would only allow use of all or certain resources but would not allow configuration changes to be performed by that user.
Implementing RBAC provides companies with a number of important benefits:
NetApp Cloud Data Sense is a powerful tool designed to give you insight into the data you store across all your storage environments, whether they’re in the cloud or the data center. As a data governance management and monitoring tool, access levels are imperative in Cloud Data Sense.
As different personnel need different access levels to the data in your organization, Cloud Data Sense’s new role-based access controls give you a way to define specific roles that have access to different resource types within the platform.
The role-based access controls in Cloud Data Sense are basically inherited from the access level structure already used by Cloud Manager. Remember that Cloud Manager is the SaaS-based single management pane from where you can manage all your ONTAP based storage, either on-prem or cloud-based. From Cloud Manager you can also consume a list of NetApp services, such as Cloud Tiering and Cloud Insights.
When a user signs up for Cloud Central, an account admin in Cloud Manager will associate that user to the account and give the user any of the roles below:
We just went over the different user levels in Cloud Manager and the rights they have when manipulating Cloud Data Sense. With the Compliance Viewer role, the new RBAC feature has introduced a powerful tool for admins to govern who has access to data in their organization.
There are a number of benefits to RBAC coming to Cloud Data Sense:
With the data privacy laws in effect around the world today, the question of who gains access to sensitive data is critically important. Role-based access becomes essential in order to control who gains access to what. RBAC is an efficient way to enhance security in a network,especially in large ones.
Many organizations have different divisions that, for various reasons, need access to sensitive data for different reasons. Human resources, legal departments, or security team members may all need to access different parts or sections of this sensitive pool of data. But that doesn’t mean all of it should be accessible.
With the new RBAC feature, the Compliance Viewer role grants users access only to the data they need to review, without exposing data that isn't relevant to their research. This narrows down the focus each user has in accordance to their needs and leaves the rest of the information hands-off. This added granularity contributes to governing the proper use of data and to the effectiveness in granting access to different levels of the organization without increasing risk.
By limiting the access users have to data, you can control how that data is used, limiting the amount of storage and network is consumed through usage.
In a modern context, where privacy laws and acts require companies to be diligent when it comes to using and protecting personal data, compliance and data privacy management are key objectives. NetApp Cloud Data Sense can help you meet them.
The newly added RBAC feature adapts even further to the dynamic access requirements that an organization might encounter across its different divisions or departments. This makes life easier for the compliance team since the different persona types can access the data they need without exposing other data that is irrelevant to their intention.
This more granular level of access increases access efficiency and allows security chiefs or IT admins to determine who sees what when multiple users need to access specific data.
No matter where you store your data—on-prem, in the cloud, or in a SQL or NoSQL database—you can get a better understanding of your data and gain a higher level of data governance over it with Cloud Data Sense.
Try out Cloud Data Sense today, free for up to 1 TB of data.