GigaOm Radar for Data Access Governancev3.01

1. Executive Summary

Data access governance furnishes secure access controls to the enterprise data organizations rely on for operations, analytics, and competitive advantage. It affords protection at the most granular level—the data layer—by enforcing which user personas can access what data, with which particular attributes, according to defined organizational purposes. This technology secures data from external and internal parties while delivering to authorized users speedy access to the data assets that improve efficiency and heighten productivity.

Data access governance is mandatory for meeting the defensive objectives of any data strategy seeking to reduce the risks of data silos, data vulnerabilities, data privacy, regulatory compliance, and employee mishaps. It streamlines access controls across diverse tooling and environments, making distributed architectures like data fabric and data mesh practical to implement. Moreover, this discipline redoubles the value of, and confidence in, generative AI, data science, analytics, and business intelligence by decreasing time to access data and ensuring it’s done securely.

By rendering manual access control lists, policy writing, and policy implementation obsolete through centralizing, automating, and distributing this work to sources, data access governance is pivotal to several constituents. End users benefit from the ease and expedience with which they can now access data in time to take action. IT teams can provision data sources quicker without being burdened by the lack of business understanding of what the data is for. Data governance personnel can monitor, audit, and issue permissions to distributed resources from a central console that reinforces data security, regulatory compliance, and other data governance necessities.

Point solutions that tackle data access governance solutions are no longer tenable. Scaling access controls to the number of users and individual situations for which there are policies requires contemporary attribute-based access control (ABAC) measures. The assortment of hybrid cloud and multicloud environments in which organizations compute and store data requires modern methods of writing policies once before deploying them across countless data sources. The deluge of compliance regimes like the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, data privacy regulations like the Colorado Privacy Act, and stiff penalties for non-adherence justifies, from a cost perspective, the zero-tolerance approach to sensitive data exposure these solutions reinforce.

And, most of all, the enhanced business worth of employing modern foundation models, language applications, and other types of AI and analytics further underscores the need to implement data access governance quickly, responsibly, and securely. Data access governance solutions supply controlled access to the data required for these and other use cases at the pace of business, which is accelerating daily.

This is our third year evaluating the data access governance space (although in previous years, the subject was data governance) in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines 11 of the top data access governance solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading data access governance offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.