Best practice 4.1 – Allow data owners to determine which people or systems can access data in analytics and downstream workloads
Data owners are the people that have direct responsibility for data protection. For instance, the data owners want to determine which data is publicly accessible, or which data is restricted access to whom or what systems. The data owners should be able to provide data access rules, so that the analytics workload can implement the rules.
Suggestion 4.1.1 – Identify data owners and assign roles
Data ownership is the management and oversight of an organization's data assets to help provide business users with high-quality data that is easily accessible in a consistent manner. Because the analytics workload consolidates multiple datasets into a central place, each dataset is owned by different teams or people. So, it is important for the analytics workload to identify which dataset is owned by whom to have the owners control the data access permissions.
Suggestion 4.1.2 – Identify permission using a permission matrix for users and roles based on actions performed on the data by users and downstream systems
To aid in identifying and communicating data-access permissions, an Access Control Matrix is a helpful method to document which users, roles, or systems have access to which datasets, and to describe what actions they can perform. Below is a sample matrix for two users, and two roles for two schemas with a table in them:
Table 1: Example Access Control Matrix for Users and Roles
|
Permissions |
Read |
Write |
|---|---|---|
| Schema 1 | User1, User2, Role1, Role2 | Role1 |
| Schema 1 / Table 1 | User1, User2, Role1, Role2 | Role2 |
| Schema 2 | User1, User2, Role1, Role2 | User1, Role1 |
| Schema 2 / Table 2v | User1, User2, Role1, Role2 | User2, Role2 |
The matrix format can help identify the least permissions that are required by various resources and to avoid overlaps. An Access Control Matrix should be thought of as an abstract model of permissions at a given point in time. Periodically review the actual access permissions against the permission matrix document to ensure accuracy.
