News
Satori Unveils Universal Data Permissions Scanner, A Free Open-Source Tool that Sheds Light on Data Access Authorization
May 2023 by Marc Jacob
Satori announced the release of its Universal Data Permissions Scanner, a free open-source tool that enables companies to easily understand which employees have access to what data, reducing the risks associated with overprivileged or unauthorized users and streamlining compliance reporting.
User authorization for data access is complex. The answer to the question “who has access to what data?” is often unclear because of complex role hierarchies, different authorization models used for different technologies, and the variety of data that may be accessible across technologies and clouds.
The Universal Data Permissions Scanner (UDPS) simplifies the complexity associated with authorization. This has a significant impact on the ability to quickly and easily share information across departments, increasing the time-to-value. Simultaneously, using the UDPS reduces the security risk from overprivileged users by ensuring that access controls are appropriately applied and revoked.
Proper controls must be in place to prevent unauthorized access, track data usage, identify unusual behavior, and remain compliant with data privacy laws. Without modern tools, however, authorization is particularly difficult to track and remains a significant data security blindspot. Obtaining this view is especially challenging due to complex data infrastructures, inefficient manual processes, and a constantly changing workforce. Authorization information can also be obstructed, making it difficult to identify who has access to various data assets beyond simple data table permissions, with complexities such as hierarchies and dependencies impeding visibility.
The Universal Data Permissions Scanner from Satori addresses these challenges head-on, providing companies with a clear view of data access authorizations. The free tool scans databases, data warehouses, cloud accounts, or data lakes, and analyzes the permissions model of the data platforms to retrieve a human-readable list of users, and their access level to the various data assets, including database tables, cloud storage buckets and files, and more. Notably, the Universal Data Permissions Scanner is platform-agnostic, making it capable of providing authorization intel across any data store. It currently supports Snowflake, Databricks, Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, MongoDB and others. Since this is an open-source project, users can continue to add new data stores, expanding the power and value of the tool for the data security community.
Gaining transparency into data access through the Universal Data Permissions Scanner enables companies to reduce the risks associated with overprivileged users, improve their data posture, enhance data security, and simplify compliance reporting, freeing up valuable time for critical business tasks.
The Universal Data Permissions Scanner by Satori is available now on GitHub.
