Security & Compliance

  • 14 min read

Top 10 Data Access Governance Solutions in 2024

Rohit Rao

21st July, 2023

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Implementing robust data access governance (DAG), practices has become paramount with the rise in data breaches and regulatory requirements. DAG refers to the framework and processes that control and monitor data access within an organization, ensuring that the right individuals have appropriate access to data while minimizing the risk of unauthorized access.

To tackle this complex task effectively, IT managers can leverage a data access governance tool, which streamlines and automates the process, offering numerous benefits like preventing security risks and maintaining compliance.

Adopting cloud and collaboration platforms like SaaS apps for unstructured data storage has complicated the data management process. On top of that, there's the added task of protecting this data from cyber risks and ensuring it follows privacy rules. All of this together can make things a bit challenging.

Data access governance solution enables you to identify what unstructured data is stored, who can access it, and why it's relevant. It also provides active protection for repositories that store sensitive and valuable data. Access reviews ensure that only authorized users have access to this data.

Such a data access governance tool offers several key features that enhance data security and streamline access management processes. 

Key Features Of A Data Access Governance Tool

Let's explore some of the crucial features:

• Centralized Access Control: A data access governance tool allows IT managers to centrally manage and enforce access policies across the organization. It provides a unified platform to define user roles, permissions, and entitlements, ensuring consistency and minimizing the risk of errors or discrepancies.

• Access Certification and Reviews: The tool enables periodic access certifications and reviews, ensuring access rights remain up-to-date and aligned with business needs. IT managers can automate the process of reviewing and approving user access, reducing manual effort and enhancing efficiency.

• Segregation of Duties (SoD): A data access governance tool helps enforce SoD policies by identifying and preventing conflicts of interest. It ensures that no single user has excessive access privileges that could lead to fraudulent activities or unauthorized data manipulation.

• Audit and Compliance Reporting: The tool generates comprehensive audit trails and compliance reports, providing your teams with valuable insights into user access patterns and potential risks. These reports help demonstrate regulatory compliance and enable proactive identification of security gaps or anomalies.

• Data Classification and Protection: The tool enables your teams to classify data based on sensitivity and assign appropriate access controls. It helps implement data protection measures such as encryption, anonymization, or data loss prevention, safeguarding critical information from unauthorized access or leakage.

This post will help you explore the list of data access governance tools for your organization.

10 Data Access Governance Tools

Now, let’s discuss the top 10 data access governance tools.

1. Zluri

In the realm of data access governance, Zluri acknowledges the challenges you face and provides a robust identity governance and administration (IGA) platform tailored for the SaaS and AI era. The platform enables you to effectively manage access across your entire SaaS environment from start to finish.

With Zluri's IGA platform, you have the power to control and bolster security effortlessly. It offers valuable features like user provisioning, automated access reviews, and self-service access requests. These capabilities empower you to ensure that each user's access is appropriately regulated and in line with your organization's policies. As a result, not only does your security strengthen, but you also achieve compliance with the necessary regulations.

Let's explore how Zluri stands out from other IGA tools by offering unique capabilities.

• Gain data visibility through the powerful discovery engine

Zluri simplifies the process for your IT team to gather valuable data about your SaaS applications and users, ensuring strong data access governance. Zluri offers five effective discovery methods to identify this information: Single Sign-On (SSO), finance and expense management, API integrations, desktop agents (optional), and browser extensions (optional).

But Zluri goes beyond just data discovery. The platform integrates seamlessly with over 800 SaaS applications, providing you with real-time data, insightful analysis, and AI-powered alerts to keep you informed and in control.

By leveraging API-based integrations, Zluri guarantees thorough data discovery across all your SaaS applications, leaving no hidden information. You can rely on Zluri to deliver 100% visibility into your SaaS environment.

Moreover, Zluri boasts the industry's largest library, with over 225,000 apps. It excels in providing detailed access data, delving into the specifics. This enables you to have a comprehensive understanding of user permissions and access levels within your SaaS ecosystem, empowering effective data access governance.

• Streamline users’ access governance with Zluri’s automation engine

Zluri's automation engine acts as a self-driving system for your organization, ensuring smooth and efficient automation of access workflows while adhering to strict rules and policies. It simplifies user access management, upholding strong security measures throughout the process.

Now, let’s explore the automation capabilities of Zluri.

• Manage Data Access with User Lifecycle Management

When onboarding new employees, Zluri's IGA solution streamlines the setup of their access to necessary applications and resources. By integrating with HR systems and employing automated processes, Zluri empowers your IT teams to efficiently create user accounts across multiple applications from a centralized location. This eliminates errors, reduces administrative workload, and ensures new employees have the appropriate access right from the start.

Additionally, Zluri's capabilities extend to offboarding employees. Through automated deprovisioning workflows, Zluri helps your IT teams revoke user access across all applications, minimizing the risk of abandoned accounts and potential security breaches.

Zluri offers unique features that set it apart in the realm of effective lifecycle management, particularly in terms of data access governance:

• Customizable workflows: Zluri allows you to create pre-defined workflows tailored to your organization's specific requirements. This eliminates the need for manually granting and revoking access permissions. The intuitive interface enables customization based on user roles, departments, and seniority levels.

  

  

Onboarding

Offboarding

• Powerful app recommendations & in-app suggestions: Zluri provides contextual-based app recommendations based on user profiles, departments, and seniority levels. This makes it convenient for your team to select the most suitable apps for provisioning. 

  

  

Moreover, Zluri offers in-app suggestions to enhance user productivity by recommending required actions for efficient task performance.

• Save Workflows as Playbooks for Future-use: Zluri enables you to save these workflows as predefined "playbooks." This eliminates the need to recreate workflows for each user, further ensuring security and increasing productivity.

  

  

Access request management with a self-serve model

Zluri makes it easy to manage user access during role changes with its Employee App Store (EAS). This self-serve model gives your IT team control over employees' access to important tools and applications.

Zluri simplifies the process of managing user access by allowing your IT team to review and approve access requests based on employees' roles and responsibilities. This ensures that only the necessary permissions are granted, helping you govern access and protect sensitive information within your organization.

Zluri's transparent approval system, consisting of app owners, reporting managers, and IT admins, allows higher-level authorities to make decisions and override lower-level admins or managers. This hierarchical structure ensures proper control and governance over data access.

Additionally, Zluri's "changelog" feature keeps users informed about updates related to their access requests, such as approvals, rejections, changes in license duration or tier, and comments from admins. This helps users stay updated and aware of any changes or decisions made regarding their access to applications, promoting data access governance.

• Govern data access with Zluri’s access review capabilities

Zluri's access review solution simplifies the management of user permissions and reviews, ensuring the security and compliance of your organization's data. It provides a centralized platform for security, GRC, and auditors to easily review and report on user access.

With Zluri, you can effortlessly set parameters for user access reviews, select reviewers, and schedule campaigns. By leveraging intelligent automation, Zluri assesses user access rights based on predefined rules, saving time and reducing errors compared to manual spreadsheet reviews.

Zluri goes beyond reviews by offering auto-remediation capabilities. If access violations are detected, it takes immediate corrective actions, enhancing your organization's security and ensuring compliance. By revoking access for terminated employees or those with outdated privileges, Zluri helps mitigate the risk of unauthorized data breaches and keeps sensitive information secure.

Zluri generates comprehensive reports that provide valuable insights into access patterns, vulnerabilities, and compliance status. These reports make it easy to demonstrate compliance to auditors and make informed decisions about access management.

What sets Zluri apart is its unique approach to access reviews. 

It offers continuous access reviews, allowing you to maintain control over access privileges through recurring and scheduled certifications. Recurring certifications ensure consistent review and validation of access permissions, quickly identifying and addressing security weaknesses.

Additionally, scheduled certifications enable planned and timely evaluations, reducing the chances of missing critical access issues.

Zluri provides industry-standard certificate templates to simplify the certification process, making it efficient, comprehensive, accurate, and aligned with recognized guidelines.

Another distinguishing feature of Zluri is its real-time access reviews powered by artificial intelligence (AI). By conducting real-time access reviews and analyzing access patterns, user behavior, and system logs, Zluri identifies unusual or potentially risky activities. This proactive approach allows for timely mitigation of security threats and protection of sensitive data.

Zluri's access reviews support continuous monitoring, providing real-time visibility into access privileges. This enables you to promptly address access-related issues, reducing the risk of unauthorized access or misuse.

Furthermore, Zluri's AI compliance capabilities offer intelligent insights and recommendations, aligning access controls with industry regulations and standards. By simplifying the compliance process with AI technology, Zluri helps your organization easily meet regulatory requirements.

Book a Demo today!

Customer rating

• G2: 4.8/5

• Capterra: 4.9/5
  

2. ManageEngine ADAudit Plus

ADAudit Plus offers a comprehensive suite of features that streamline data access governance processes while ensuring data integrity and regulatory compliance. It empowers you with real-time monitoring capabilities, providing a view of all data access activities across the organization's network.

The tool captures every critical event, such as user logins, file modifications, and permission changes, providing detailed insights into who accessed what data and when. With customizable alerts, you can promptly detect suspicious activities, ensuring timely response and minimizing potential security risks.

Key Features 

• Comprehensive Audit Reports: ADAudit Plus offers a wide range of pre-defined reports, specifically tailored for data access governance. These reports provide a comprehensive overview of user activities, permissions, and data access patterns, enabling you to identify potential security gaps and enforce necessary access controls. 

Also, the reports can be scheduled for automatic generation and distribution, saving valuable time and effort for IT teams.

• User Behavior Analytics: The tool leverages advanced analytics and machine learning algorithms to detect and analyze patterns in user activities. By establishing baselines and continuously monitoring deviations, the tool can proactively identify unauthorized access attempts or abnormal user behavior, empowering you to promptly safeguard sensitive data.

• Compliance and Regulation Support: It offers built-in compliance reports that align with various standards, including GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and more. These reports assist IT managers in assessing and demonstrating compliance, providing a clear understanding of adherence to specific regulations. 

• Access Control and Permission Management: The tool simplifies access control management by providing a centralized console to monitor and manage user access across the organization's systems, directories, and applications. This helps prevent unauthorized access and strengthens the organization's overall security posture.

Customer rating

• G2: 4.5/5

• Capterra: 4.3/5

3. SAP Master Data Governance 

To effectively manage and control data access, SAP Master Data Governance (MDG) offers a comprehensive solution that empowers your team with seamless data governance capabilities. It serves as a centralized platform for managing master data across your organization.

The solution provides a consolidated view of all critical data, enabling you to govern and control access to this data from a single point. With SAP MDG, you can define and enforce data access policies, ensuring only authorized individuals have appropriate access rights to specific datasets.

Key Features

• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): With RBAC, you can assign roles to users based on their responsibilities and define granular access privileges. By aligning data access rights with job functions, you can ensure that users can only access the data relevant to their roles, minimizing the risk of unauthorized access or data breaches.

• Fine-Grained Data Authorization: SAP MDG enables fine-grained data authorization, allowing you to control access at a highly detailed level. You can define access permissions based on attributes such as data fields, record types, or organizational units. This level of control ensures that sensitive or confidential data is only accessible to authorized personnel, maintaining data integrity and privacy.

• Segregation of Duties (SoD) Compliance: The tool facilitates SoD compliance by enforcing separation between conflicting roles or access rights. By defining and implementing SoD rules within the system, you can minimize the risk of fraudulent activities or unauthorized data alterations.

• Audit Trail and Monitoring: SAP MDG offers comprehensive auditing and monitoring capabilities to establish transparency and accountability. It captures detailed logs of user activities, including data access and modifications. 

These logs can be leveraged for compliance audits, identifying potential security breaches, or investigating data-related incidents. Having a clear audit trail enables you to effectively track and manage data access activities within your organization.

Customer rating

• G2: 4.4/5

• Capterra: 4.7/5
  

4. NetIQ Data Access Governance

NetIQ Data Access Governance is a powerful tool designed to help your organization streamline and fortify their data access controls. With its comprehensive features and user-friendly interface, NetIQ Data Access Governance empowers you to proactively manage data access and reduce the risks associated with unauthorized or inappropriate data exposure.

The tool simplifies the complex task of managing data access by providing a centralized platform that allows you to define, enforce, and monitor access policies across their organization's various systems and applications. This tool enables you to establish a strong foundation for data protection and compliance, ensuring that only authorized individuals can access sensitive information.

Key Features 

• Access Rights Visualization: It offers a visual representation of access rights, allowing you to understand and analyze the permissions granted to users easily. This feature helps identify potential access vulnerabilities, such as excessive privileges or segregation of duties issues, enabling proactive mitigation.

• User Access Reviews: With the user access review feature, the solution simplifies regularly reviewing and recertifying user access rights. This functionality ensures that access privileges remain aligned with organizational needs and that inappropriate or outdated access is promptly identified and remediated.

• Automated Access Certification: It automates the access certification process, reducing the administrative burden on your IT teams. The tool facilitates compliance with regulatory requirements by scheduling and executing access certifications at regular intervals while minimizing the risk of access-related incidents.

• Risk Analytics and Reporting: This tool provides comprehensive risk analytics and reporting capabilities, offering insights into user access patterns, policy violations, and potential security gaps. You can leverage these analytics to make informed decisions about access controls, detect anomalies, and prevent data breaches.

Customer rating

• G2: 4/5

5. Talend

Talend provides a centralized platform that enables you to effectively manage data access permissions from a single location. With this feature, you can effortlessly define and enforce access controls, granting or restricting data access based on user roles, responsibilities, and organizational hierarchies. 

This centralized approach saves time and reduces the risk of inconsistent access policies across various systems and databases, ensuring a unified and controlled data environment.

Key Features 

• Fine-Grained Access Control: You can define and enforce granular access rules, specifying which users or groups can access specific datasets, fields, or individual records. This level of precision enables you to establish a robust data access governance framework, minimizing the risk of unauthorized data exposure and ensuring compliance with data protection regulations.

• Audit and Compliance Reporting: Ensuring regulatory compliance is a top priority for IT managers, and Talend addresses this need by offering robust audit and compliance reporting features. These reports provide a clear overview of user access patterns, data modifications, and access attempts, enabling proactive identification of potential security risks and ensuring compliance with audit requirements.

• Integration Capabilities: To enhance data access governance across the entire organizational ecosystem, Talend integrates seamlessly with various data sources, systems, and applications. This integration capability allows you to consolidate and manage data access governance policies across different platforms, databases, and cloud environments.

Customer rating

• G2: 4/5

6. Alation Data Governance

Atlation Data Governance provides a robust solution by offering a comprehensive data access governance tool. By leveraging this tool, you can effectively manage and control data access permissions within your organization, minimizing risks and ensuring regulatory compliance.

The solution simplifies the management of data access permissions, allowing you to maintain control over sensitive information. It offers a user-friendly interface, empowering you to define, review, and update access policies with ease. You can also set granular permissions at the user, group, or role level, ensuring that only authorized individuals have appropriate access to specific data sets.

Key Features

• Centralized Policy Management: With this tool, you can centralize your data access policies, streamlining governance across your organization. The tool enables you to define standardized access controls and permissions, which can be applied consistently across various data repositories and platforms. 

• Automated Compliance: The tool assists in achieving and maintaining compliance by automating policy enforcement. It allows you to configure rules and workflows, which automatically validate and enforce access permissions based on predefined policies. This automation minimizes the possibility of human error, ensuring adherence to compliance requirements.

• Real-time Monitoring and Auditing: Atlation Data Governance provides real-time monitoring and auditing capabilities, allowing you to track and analyze data access events. You can generate comprehensive reports that detail user activity, access patterns, and potential anomalies, enabling proactive identification of security risks or unauthorized access attempts.

• Intelligent Access Request Management: Atlation Data Governance incorporates an intelligent access request management system to facilitate efficient data access while maintaining governance. Users requiring access to specific data sets can submit requests through a streamlined workflow. 

You can then review and approve these requests based on predefined policies and permissions, ensuring proper access while reducing administrative overhead.

Customer rating

• G2: 4.4/5

7. Varonis Data Security Platform

Varonis Data Security offers a solution that empowers your team with effective data access governance capabilities. By implementing Varonis, you can take control of your data and safeguard it from unauthorized access, all while maintaining compliance with relevant regulations.

The platform offers comprehensive features specifically tailored to enhance data access governance. By leveraging these features, you can establish a strong foundation for controlling, monitoring, and securing your organization's critical data.

Key Features 

• Access Control Analysis: Varonis enables you to gain deep visibility into the access controls of your data repositories, such as file shares, SharePoint, and NAS devices. It automatically analyzes permissions and identifies vulnerabilities, ensuring access rights align with your policies. 

• User Behavior Analytics: The tool employs advanced user behavior analytics to detect unusual or abnormal user activities, such as unauthorized file access, data exfiltration, or privilege abuse. By identifying and investigating these anomalies in real-time, you can swiftly respond to potential data breaches or insider threats.

• Data Classification and Tagging: It provides robust data classification and tagging capabilities, allowing you to organize and label your data according to its sensitivity and importance. By categorizing your data assets, you can apply granular access controls, ensuring that only authorized personnel can access specific data sets. 

• Access Reviews and Entitlement Management: Varonis automates the access review process by generating reports highlighting user access entitlements across various data repositories. This facilitates periodic evaluations and ensures that access permissions remain up-to-date. With streamlined access reviews, you can prevent unauthorized access and swiftly respond to any access-related issues.

• Compliance Monitoring and Reporting: The platform also assists you in meeting compliance requirements by providing real-time monitoring and comprehensive reporting capabilities. It generates detailed audit trails and compliance reports, enabling you to demonstrate adherence to data access governance standards during audits or investigations.

Customer rating

• G2: 4.4/5

8. OneTrust Privacy and Data Governance Cloud

OneTrust Privacy and Data Governance Cloud offers a comprehensive solution designed to streamline data access governance processes, providing you with a powerful tool to safeguard your organization's data assets. With its array of features tailored to data access governance, OneTrust is an indispensable partner in managing data privacy and compliance.

Key Features

• Centralized Access Controls: The tool provides a centralized platform for managing and enforcing access controls across the organization's data ecosystem. You can define and configure granular access policies, determining who can access specific data, and under what circumstances. This enables precise control over data accessibility, reducing the risk of unauthorized data exposure and potential breaches. 

• Role-Based Permissions: It enables you to define roles and associated access rights, ensuring that data is accessed only by authorized personnel. By aligning data access with job functions, you can maintain the principle of least privilege, minimizing the potential for data misuse or unauthorized access. 

• Access Request and Approval Workflows: When your employees need access to specific data sets, they can submit requests through the OneTrust platform. You can then review and approve these requests, ensuring that access is granted based on predefined policies and guidelines. This feature helps you maintain an auditable trail of data access requests and approvals, enabling transparency and accountability. 

• Data Access Auditing and Reporting: The tool offers comprehensive auditing capabilities, allowing you to track and monitor data access events in real-time. This enables proactive identification of any unusual or unauthorized access attempts, enhancing security and enabling timely remediation. 

Additionally, it provides customizable reports on data access patterns, access privileges, and access history, empowering you with valuable insights for compliance assessments and internal audits.

Customer rating

• G2: 4.3/5

9. OvalEdge

With OvalEdge, you can effectively manage and secure your organization's data while maintaining control over who has access to sensitive information. OvalEdge provides you with a centralized platform to implement and manage data access controls. 

With its intuitive user interface, you can easily define access policies, permissions, and roles based on user profiles. By centralizing access control, OvalEdge allows you to ensure that only authorized individuals have appropriate access to sensitive data, reducing the risk of unauthorized data breaches.

Key Features

• Fine-Grained Data Permissions: One of OvalEdge's standout features is its ability to enforce fine-grained data permissions. It allows you to define access privileges down to the granular level, specifying which users or groups can view, edit, or delete specific data sets. 

This level of control allows you to align users’ access to your organizational data with requirements, ensuring that only the right people have access to the right data, and minimizing the potential for data misuse or leakage.

• Access Monitoring and Auditing: It offers robust access monitoring and auditing capabilities, providing IT managers with real-time visibility into data access activities. You can track and review user actions, monitor data access patterns, and detect any suspicious activities. 

By maintaining an audit trail of data access events, OvalEdge enables you to promptly identify and address potential security threats, ensuring data integrity and compliance with regulatory requirements.

• Data Access Reviews and Recertification: OvalEdge automates the access review process to maintain data access governance. You can schedule regular access reviews and receive notifications when reviews are due. This feature ensures that data access permissions remain up-to-date and aligned with evolving business needs, reducing the risk of access creep or unauthorized data exposure.

Customer rating

• G2: 5/5

• Capterra: 4/5

10. IBM Data Governance

IBM Data Governance provides a centralized platform that allows you to define and enforce data access policies across the organization. With a unified view of data access controls, you can streamline the governance process, reduce administrative overhead, and ensure consistent security practices throughout your data ecosystem.

With this tool, you can define and manage access permissions at a fine-grained level, specifying who can access specific data elements, files, or databases. This ensures that only authorized individuals can access sensitive information, reducing the risk of data breaches and ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements.

Key Features

• Policy-Based Access Management: IBM Data Governance enables you to define data access policies based on various criteria such as user roles, departments, or data classifications. These policies can be easily configured and customized to align with your organization's specific security and compliance needs.

• Real-time Monitoring and Auditing: It allows you to monitor access activities, detect any unauthorized or suspicious behavior, and generate comprehensive audit reports. This helps identify potential security risks, address compliance gaps, and demonstrate regulatory compliance during audits.

• Data Lifecycle Management: IBM Data Governance integrates with data management tools to provide end-to-end visibility and control over data access throughout its lifecycle, from creation to archival or deletion. This ensures that data access policies remain consistent and effective across all stages, minimizing the risk of data misuse or unauthorized access.

• Collaboration and Workflow: The solution facilitates collaboration among various stakeholders involved in the data access governance process. You can create workflows, assign tasks, and track progress, ensuring that data access requests and policy changes are efficiently managed. This promotes accountability and transparency, enabling smooth coordination between your IT teams, data owners, and business units.

Customer rating

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About the author

Rohit Rao

Rohit works in the Community and Marketing Team of Zluri and is a strong advocate of community led growth.