Self-Service Data Access Governance

You’re probably aware of the rise of  “walk out” technology that is allowing supermarket chains to get rid of tills. Tesco and Aldi are both opening stores that dispense with the need for any checkouts and Amazon has opened six checkout-free Amazon Fresh stores in London this year.

Doing without checkout staff is arguably just another step in what has been a long process of the customers doing the work instead of someone else…and the same concept is being applied to Data Access Governance by companies worldwide.

Peter Bradley, CEO at Torsion says: “Instead of a central IT team ‘scanning’ every single piece of data to make sure it is secure, which is physically impossible now due to the rising volume of data within organisation, each and every data owner simply controls the access themselves.”

The parallels between retail and data ownership are many. A shopper is the only person that knows what’s in their basket and why it’s there. The cashier cannot know this level of information. Likewise a data owner (the person that created the piece of information or file) is the only person that knows why they created the information and most importantly who else should have access to it. In this example, it is the IT team that cannot know that level of information.

So why are IT teams still being asked to manage and control data access on a micro level?

It’s time for Data Access Governance to move to a self-service style of automation and Torsion is the first of its’ kind to empower business users by enabling them to control their data access directly.

“As long as the process is simple and automated, business users are in a far better position of keeping organisational data secure and relevant. They are effectively ‘checking out’ their own data. Controlling data access is rife for automation and we need to empower individuals to control, and trust in, their own data.”