Every company and government entity is tasked with striking a critical balance between data access and security. As Forrester’s Senior Analyst Richard Joyce stated, “For a typical Fortune 1000 company, just a 10 percent increase in data accessibility will result in more than $65 million additional net income.” As the need to become more data-driven accelerates, it’s imperative enterprises equally balance privacy and governance requirements.
To achieve this balance, we need to change how we perceive data security. Amidst growing friction between teams — i.e. those who create and manage data access policies and those who need data to perform their duties — we must accept security, IT, and privacy teams want to provision as much data as possible. But those teams face constraints and compliance complexity.
Traditionally, data security, privacy, and regulations have been thought of as a cost center expense. Instead, we need to look at data security as the means for positive change, a driver for greater data accessibility, enhanced operational efficiency, and actual business value.
Many remain far short of the goal
Enterprises of all sizes struggle with the shift. NewVantage Partners’s Data and AI Leadership Executive Survey 2023 found less than a quarter of firms reported a data-driven organization or data culture. And in the State of Data and Analytics Governance, Gartner suggests by 2025 80 percent of organizations seeking to scale digital business, including analytical initiatives, will fail because they don’t modernize their data and analytics governance.
Data access drives growth. So, what’s the reason for low data-culture adoption? To be truly data-driven requires tight collaboration between many different functions, and there’s a lack of certainty regarding individual-role responsibilities. Strategic gaps must be addressed.
The reality of data security and access
When it comes to data security and access, companies are typically either:
Overly restrictive on data access. Data security is seen as an impediment to overall company growth. This is typically due to data, organizational, and technological complexity.Or, overly focused on perimeter and application defenses, leveraging cyberdefenses and coarse-grained identity and access management (IAM). Data systems are open to exploitation in the event of a breach.
Most experience the worst of both these scenarios, where data security and access are simply broken — inconsistent, atomistic.
A primary challenge of solving the data democratization balancing act lies in the complex web of internal and external privacy, security, and governance policies. They change over time and need to be applied and maintained consistently and efficiently across business teams.
In the middle are the technical teams managing the complex data and analytical system. Due to constraints, security, privacy, and data management teams default to a tight lockdown of data to ensure compliance and security. It’s not any one team’s fault, but a major blocker to becoming data-driven.
Unified data security platform
Siloed, decentralized, inefficient, unclear roles and responsibilities, and an absence of a holistic strategy. So, what’s the solution as more companies face costly data breaches and low data usability rates? An enterprise-wide, scalable strategy that leverages a unified data security platform. One that includes integrated capabilities to simplify and automate universal data security processes across the entire data and analytic ecosystem. With the ability to discover and classify sensitive data, data attributes can be used to automatically deliver instantaneous data access to authorized users. Proper data security governance helps teams get access to more data faster.
Additional data masking and encryption layers can be added to make sensitive data available for analytics without compromising security. Even if a breach occurs, fine-grained access limits exposure, and audit capabilities quickly identify compromised data.
Executing a proper data security strategy provides the last mile of the data governance and cataloging journey. All of it key to the balancing act of data democratization, with comprehensive data governance enabling faster insights while maintaining compliance.
Enterprise-wide governed data sharing
Privacera helps Fortune companies modernize their data architecture via a holistic, enterprise-wide data security platform and automated data governance. A data security platform empowers the data democratization you need to increase data usability and nurture your data-driven culture. Analysts and business units get more data faster. IT liberates time and resources. Security and privacy teams easily monitor and implement data security policies.
Learn more about achieving modern data security governance and democratized analytics for faster insights here.
Data and Information Security