Now, more than ever, organizations need a clear and consistent way to ensure that the access permissions for all their data are applied consistently across the enterprise. We call this unified entitlements, and a perfect storm of events is driving the need for it.
- AI tools make data in all forms more accessible than ever before.
- Data is captured in a broader range of tools (both in the cloud and on-premises), each with its own security model.
- Hackers are more sophisticated than ever, and the need for highly decentralized information repositories with strong security models is now seen as a critical way to deter them.
In the same way that we now have technologies that enable better information access, we also have technologies that make securing this information more robust and scalable. You can learn more about how this is done in our blog post, “Inside the Unified Entitlements Architecture.” In this article, we describe how a Unified Entitlements Service (UES) can be set up to consistently replicate information access rules from a central source across a wide range of products so that these rules are the same throughout the organization.
As with most problems, technology is only part of the solution. Implementing a UES is not merely a technical project, but a transformational journey. As part of this journey, organizations typically progress through several maturity stages:
- Discovery and Assessment: Mapping the current entitlement landscape across platforms and identifying the highest-risk inconsistencies.
- Policy Standardization: Creating a unified policy framework that translates business rules into technical controls.
- Incremental Implementation: Rolling out UES capabilities gradually, starting with the most critical data sources and expanding over time.
- Continuous Improvement: Refining policies, enhancing performance, and expanding coverage to new data platforms as they enter the enterprise ecosystem.
The Discovery and Assessment stage is critical to understanding the complexity of implementing unified entitlements across an organization. During this stage, analysts identify which repositories need content with specific entitlement rules, the rules that need to be described, and how they will be implemented. Most organizations focus on securing their datasets and SharePoint online. While that is a good starting point, there are many other repositories that likely need to be properly secured. Information like contracts, client data, pricing, and product specifications may all require their own security policies. It is important to put together a list of these repositories and their business owners so that the true scope of the problem is understood correctly. Once this list is in place, the security rules (or policies) can be enumerated. These rules might look like the following:
Limit access to client team members, the project sponsor, and senior leadership only
This list of rules for different information assets should be understandable by both business and technical people and is often quite lengthy. Having discovered the repositories and established the rules, it is important to identify who is responsible for ensuring these rules are in place both at the time of the analysis and in the future. Once this discovery work is complete, the entitlements team can start to move into iterative project implementation.
After defining the repositories and rules, the Policy Standardization process begins. During this stage, the security rules defined in the first stage are aligned with the systems to which they apply to, and the security policy models are developed. Each system has its own way of managing security, and the new security policy models need to account for these requirements. Since most security models are either role-based or attribute-based, the new policy models typically address requirements for groups and attributes at an enterprise level. One of the key outputs of this stage are the guidelines for how groups need to be managed and what personal attributes need to be captured, managed, and shared with other applications.
After a core set of policies are defined, the Incremental Implementation stage can begin. During this stage, IT works with repository owners to automate the application of entitlements using the UES. This is a collaborative effort where IT implements the rules to automate entitlements, and business users identify the exceptions that inevitably arise. Both parties then work through the exceptions until the entitlements are correct. Then, this process is repeated with other repositories across the enterprise, focusing on the most critical repositories first.
The Continuous Improvement stage begins once the initial implementations are completed. Information management should never be static. As new information types are captured, new systems are implemented, and new security policies are required, the entitlements must be updated. We help our clients define a repeatable process to update their UES with the latest policies to keep their entitlements aligned with continuously changing business needs.
This journey yields progressive benefits at each stage, from reduced administrative overhead to enhanced security and an improved compliance posture. Organizations that successfully navigate this transformation gain not just better governance but a strategic advantage: the ability to safely democratize data access while maintaining robust protection for sensitive information.
Our Unified Entitlements team has helped others through this journey. If you want to solve your entitlement problems, please contact our team for guidance at info@enterprise-knowledge.com.