Data democratization via policies and processes

If everything is locked down, then there is no threat of exposure. However, that is not the intended agenda of data organizations. Getting the relevant data in the hands of the right privileged audience helps a company innovate by allowing people to explore and discover new meaningful ways to add business value from the data. IT should not be the bottleneck in the process of data democratization. If new datasets are brought in, IT should not be overwhelmed with tickets from every part of the organization requesting access to them. So, enabling self-service with appropriate security guardrails is an important responsibility of an administrator. This is where policies play an important role in policing an environment, either preventing an unintended situation from taking place or reporting against it by running scans to detect patterns so that bad actors or novices can be corrected in time.

Policies can be of several types; some typical...