Gain real-time visibility of appropriate access to data
Author: Eric Zimmerman, Product Marketing Manager
In today’s data-driven landscape, modern enterprises depend on their business data to boost productivity and drive innovation. From AI initiatives to business intelligence, having the right access to the right information is crucial for data-backed decision-making.
But what happens when organizations lack full visibility of who is accessing data and the appropriateness of that access? Potential benefits could be significantly diminished. Without this visibility, organizations risk data leaks, delayed detection of breaches, and potential compliance fines due to inadequate tracking of data access.
To enable organizations to leverage their data safely and securely, identity security teams must ensure that only authorized individuals have access to business-critical data. They must monitor, track, and control how this data is used and by whom, ensuring any changes to data and access are properly recorded.
Introducing Data Access Security Activity Monitoring
We are excited to introduce Activity Monitoring as part of SailPoint Data Access Security. This feature delivers real-time visibility into data access, allowing Identity Security teams to monitor access to critical data such as sensitive employee or customer information, trade secrets, financial data, or health information.
Data Access Security tracks all actions across governed applications, providing detailed information about the identities and actors involved. Administrators can explore how sensitive data is used, audit changes to data or access privileges, and trace the evolution of data access over time — all through a single pane of glass.
Reduce Risky Access with Enhanced Identity Context
Knowing who is accessing sensitive data is crucial to understanding how it is being used throughout the organization’s different business units, departments, and processes. It is also critical to detect unauthorized or inappropriate access.
Data Access Security correlates actor information with Identity Security Cloud’s identity cube information, providing rich context about the users performing the operations, including details like their organizational unit, access profile, location, or lifecycle state. This helps to distinguish between legitimate access that drives productivity and unauthorized, risky access — whether from employees, contractors, or machines, such as service accounts.
Monitor Risky Access and Access Changes Made on High-Risk Data
Whether dealing with a customer’s personal information or crucial company assets, it is imperative to restrict access to sensitive data to authorized individuals. Data Access Security’s built-in data classification capabilities spotlight activity on highly sensitive and regulated content.
This enhanced data context helps teams prioritize high-risk access. It enables identity security administrators to focus their monitoring on risky actors who are accessing their organization’s crown jewels. It also helps compliance managers quicky and easily report on any access changes made to sensitive and regulated data.
Fortify Access Integrity and Mature Security Posture
Ensuring that all access is granted through authorized governance processes is crucial for maintaining sustainable access models and improving data security. When access is granted directly to data resources — or by manipulating security groups outside of organizational processes without appropriate review — it weakens the overall security posture.
Data Access Security Activity Monitoring helps identity security administrators and business owners detect such native changes immediately, enabling them to restore governance and maintain secure access models.
Streamline Incident Response, Forensics, and Remediation
Proactive governance is the best way to minimize the impacts of data breaches. Creating a sustainable least privilege access model and a continuous governance strategy helps ensure the right access is granted at the right time, containing the potential blast radius if an identity is jeopardized. But when an incident does occur, a swift response and remediation are of the utmost importance.
Data Access Security provides detailed forensics capabilities, enabling administrators to investigate incidents, analyze real-time access, search for access patterns, and retrospect past incidents. With a complete view of the data accessed, data security teams can quickly assess potential damage, helping them reduce disruption to the business.
Data Access Security Activity Monitoring empowers identity security teams with comprehensive visibility and deep insights into data usage, enabling administrators to:
- Understand data access within and outside the organization
- Secure access to highly sensitive and regulated data and help prevent misuse
- Protect identity security investments by highlighting unauthorized access changes
- Expedite incident investigation, response, and remediation with forensic analytics
See how Data Access Security helps keep your sensitive data safe