Data democratization encourages broader access to data, enabling employees in multiple disciplines across an organization to get insights and make good business decisions. However, while the desire to decentralize data access is strong, it’s essential to maintain a tight framework for data security, governance, and access permissions.
Understanding data democratization
Data democratization empowers all employees to access and utilize data effectively. This requires not only the right tools but also a supportive organizational culture that promotes data literacy. As highlighted in the Harvard Business Review article “5 Pillars for Democratizing Data at Your Organization”, people often conflate data democratization with universal access to data. Instead, the focus ought to be on ensuring that employees who do not have “data” in their title – whom we might refer to as non-technical people – feel comfortable incorporating data into their daily activities and evolving into responsible data citizens. It’s a transformation that requires a comprehensive cultural shift, teaching a broader range of employees how to leverage data within their specific functional areas to contribute to creating business value and driving innovation based on data.
Understanding the importance of user access management
User access management is the backbone of data democratization. It empowers everyone to access the data they need while ensuring that sensitive data remains protected. Access control ensures that the right individuals have the appropriate permissions to access data, a process. which can range from simple measures like granting business users view-only access, to more complex strategies such as masking sensitive data.
Access control is critical for several reasons:
- Maintaining good-quality data. By controlling who can modify or update data, organizations minimize the risk of important tables being overwritten or deleted. This ensures that the data remains reliable and trustworthy, empowering decision making without frequent validation from the data team.
- Adding transparency. By customizing access permissions, organizations can track who interacts with the data and how, while increasing accountability.
- Ensuring freedom for business users. By enabling a self-service capability, business users have the freedom to access the data they need, whenever they need it. This reduces the burden on data engineers who can focus on higher-priority tasks.
By implementing robust access control, organizations can break down data silos, eliminate bottlenecks, and foster a culture of collaboration and transparency.
Role-Based Access customization in Soda Cloud
At Soda, we believe that while everyone should have the opportunity to access and leverage data, organizations must still prioritize control over who can see and interact with that data. That’s why we’ve enhanced role-based access controls (RBAC) in Soda Cloud with the launch of customizable roles and permissions.
Here’s how these new features can benefit your organization on the journey to governed data democratization:
1. Customizable roles and permissions
Gone are the days of relying solely on generic roles like Manager, Editor, and Viewer. Now, you can tailor access to data to align with specific needs. For instance, you can create a role for Product Marketing that allows them to view sample data and propose data quality checks on particular datasets while restricting editing capabilities on others. Need to enhance the default Editor role? You can easily edit its permissions to add new capabilities, such as deleting datasets.
2. Streamlined user management
We’ve reduced the administrative burden of ensuring consistent permissions across your organization by enabling user group synchronization from your Identity Provider (IdP) to Soda Cloud. This saves time during onboarding and offboarding while minimizing human error. It is SSO easy!
3. Bulk editing for enhanced efficiency
Managing access to multiple datasets can be cumbersome, but our new bulk editing feature streamlines this process. Whether you prefer to use the Soda Cloud UI or its API, you can now assign roles and permissions to multiple datasets in one go.
How access control helps data democratization
Access control empowers data owners to efficiently manage data requests while ensuring that data is accessible. Its benefits for data democratization include:
- Accelerating value creation by enabling quick access to a wide range of dataset
- Improving decision making by ensuring users can easily identify and use the most relevant data
"We've been using Soda for some time now with great success. Our organization manages a large number of datasets and a rapidly growing user base, and the new role-based access features have significantly improved our administrative processes. These features were introduced just before we undertook a major scale-out effort, and the ability to organize users into groups has made this transition much smoother for our small team. I'm incredibly pleased to see Soda investing in scalable administrative tools, as they greatly enhance the platform's operational maturity for larger enterprise customers." Zach Phillips, Senior Growth Analyst, Appfire
Follow the yellow brick road
Implementing a successful data access strategy requires ongoing maintenance and the application of governance policies, but democratizing data access shouldn’t come at the cost of security or governance. With Soda Cloud’s role-based access management features, you can confidently provide your teams with access to data that is trusted across the organization.
Democratize, don’t compromise. With Soda Cloud, you can have the best of both worlds and foster a more accessible and secure data environment.
Implement access control
Learn more in Soda documentation: