Skip to Main Content

Get Your Head Out of the Clouds and Start Governing Access to Your Data

“You have to be there not for the fame and glory, but you have to be there because you believe your talent and ability can be applied effectively to operation…”—Alan Shepard, first American in space

 When looking at this quote, it can be applied to smartly governing access to sensitive data, especially in the cloud. Enterprises need to make sure they are using every resource at their disposal to effectively operate when securing their users and their access to both applications and the sensitive data they need to do their jobs. Nowadays, cloud adoption is simply a fact of life and there are four main drivers for this movement.

Digital Transformation: The digital transformation brings more data and more collaboration to modern businesses. Cloud is a delivery vehicle for implementing the best productivity and collaboration across the business in this ever-changing and growing era.

Opex Over Capex: With the public cloud, users can buy in an opex or pay-as-you-go model.

Need for Speed: Good IT people are expensive. This doesn’t mean that you’ll be forced to downsize your current staff, but rather, you’ll be able to efficiently improve your IT department’s operations by deploying staff to other areas of your business, improving your bottom-line capabilities.

Shadow IT: Let’s face it, in many cases, we’ve had a jump-start into cloud projects due to employees who have already used them while IT was left behind.

While the operational drivers of moving to the cloud are significant, compliance, data governance, and identity governance remain part of the customer responsibilities. With all of this digital change, companies need to keep their eye on the prize: securing access to all of the applications and data their users need, regardless of where data is stored – in the cloud, on-premises or otherwise. Here’s how identity governance helps:  

Control

The new cloud paradigm empowers the business users to govern the data,  almost every user can change the permissions to the data (even if it’s sensitive or regulated) with no holistic view of the entire impact of the business.

SailPoint actively lowers the risk by alerting external sharing. Being able to get visibility into external sharing is crucial in order to provide an insightful alert to drive remediation.

Scale

With SailPoint you can adopt a new permission model as introduced by the leading cloud collaboration platforms. This introduces a new concept for governing access to data as it grows exponentially.

Change

Every business collaborates with partners, third parties and customers over sensitive data stored in cloud applications, which can quickly result in chaos. The days of a CIFS/NFS based permission model where there’s a single identity store (AD) and clear inheritance model are long gone.

SailPoint helps centrally manage access for all storage applications through a “single pane of glass” to manage policies, reporting, configuration for all storage applications on-prem and cloud. By doing so enables the IT to support the business in adopting more and more cloud applications storage in a secure and viable fashion.

Compliance

GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA and other regulations, require from every business to know where the private information resides and monitor access to this data.

SailPoint identifies and audits all access to private identifiable information, HIPAA regulated information and more. Reporting and RT alerts are available to make sure the Auditor requirements are met, regardless of where data is stored: in the cloud, on-premises or otherwise.

The moral of the story is this: it’s okay to have your head in the clouds, but make sure you’re securing your identities and the data they interact with, while you do.


Discussion