Data controls

Data controls refer to the tactics, policies, and procedures that organizations use to meet their data
governance and data management objectives. Put another way, they are the rules and systems that
businesses rely on to ensure that only authorized users can access their data, ensuring its security and
integrity. Data controls can be used to identify risks, track and manage data quality, implement policies,
safeguard data, and help remediate an array of potential data security issues.

As such, data controls can play an important role in both risk mitigation and compliance with the latest
regulatory requirements that govern their data usage. They’re also critical for ensuring that data is
handled properly, as well as for identifying and resolving potential data security issues.

we’ll look at the necessity of data controls, the main types you should be aware of, and best practices
for implementing them in your data ecosystem.

Why Do I Need Data Controls?

Data controls help organizations protect the sensitive personal data they possess by safeguarding it from
leaks and breaches. These controls can be either preventive, allowing you to proactively manage access
control or detective, allowing you to monitor data access and usage. Without these controls, incident
response would be reactionary rather than proactive, and would likely result in considerable
noncompliance penalties.

Having the right data controls in place has become essential for data-driven organizations looking to
maintain meet the standards of compliance and regulations and reassure increasingly vigilant customers
that their personal data will be safe. Ultimately, data controls are critical for enabling this compliance,
auditability, and transparency, as well as for revealing specific risks that organizations are exposed to
and how effectively they’re addressing them.

Types of Data Controls?

Before examining the range of different data controls, it’s important to distinguish between data privacy
control and data security control. Although these terms are often used interchangeably, they refer to
distinctly different things.

Data access control and privacy hinges on ensuring the correct handling, processing, storage, and use of
personal information. It remains focused on the rights of individuals with respect to their personal
information. By contrast, data security refers to the means, methods, and policies organizations use to
secure sensitive personal data. In other words, data privacy is about complying with regulatory
requirements, while data security is about taking actions to prevent unauthorized third parties from
accessing personal data.

As data use has matured and expanded, access control mechanisms have taken a variety of forms to
keep up with the need for security. These include:
Role-based access control (RBAC): An approach to data security that permits or restricts system access
based on an individual’s role within the organization. It assumes that users will only have access to the
data that pertains to their job functions.

Attribute-based access control (ABAC): Takes a more dynamic approach to data security. It defines
logical roles by combining the observable attributes of users and data, and determining access decisions
based on those attributes. ABAC allows for controls to be determined in multiple dimensions, making it
a very flexible model.

Purpose-based access control (PBAC): A method of data access control that makes access decisions
based on the purpose that a given user or tool intends to use the data for. These purposes can include
running a report, performing an audit, creating a new application, and much more. The variety of
purposes provides flexibility that data governance teams can use to build a high-powered, granular
access control model.

It’s also important to note that there are a variety of data masking techniques that organizations can use
to help control data access. These include k-anonymization, encryption, differential privacy, nulling,
redaction, pseudonymization, averaging, substitution, and tokenization.

Five Best Practices for Implementing Data Controls

If your organization is creating its own data control framework, there are a variety of best practices that
you should follow to achieve the best results. These include:

1. Understanding your data

Have a system for sensitive data discovery and classification to keep track of the types of data you have,
where they live, and how they’re used. Being able to automatically detect sensitive data and generate
standard tagging across multiple compute platforms eliminates manual, error-prone processes while
enabling universal data access control and visibility into sensitive data. It’s also important for
understanding what regulations your data may be subject to.

2. Planning for regulatory requirements

Once you know what regulations are relevant to your business, you can build controls to meet their
requirements. Some of the most common contemporary regulations that could impact your business
include CCPA, HIPAA, GDPR, and COPPA, amongst many others.

3. Aligning your stakeholders

4. Building for scale

It’s also important to adopt a system that can scale as your data environment — including your
platforms, data sources, users, and use cases — continues to grow. Using controls like dynamic ABAC
can help provide this necessary flexibility.

5. Enabling auditability

Always implement a data control framework that you can monitor to ensure that it is working as
intended and regularly audited to prove compliance. This is critical for risk mitigation in today’s highly
regulated markets.

In a world where companies are collecting more sensitive personal data, having the right data controls in
place is an important step toward ensuring the security and integrity of that data and mitigating
potential risks.

It’s important to assess which data controls are right for your organization’s unique situation. So too is
working with the right partner to help you implement them as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Immuta helps data teams discover, secure, and monitor their data use with dynamic, attribute-based
access controls. That way, data teams can proactively ensure and verify that their data controls are
consistently being enforced and working as intended.