Authors: Stephanie Yuen from Alation and Srikanth Sallaka from TrustLogix
As companies harness data and AI assets every day, it's crucial for them to utilize this data with confidence and trust for informed decision-making. Organizations need a comprehensive approach to be able to easily discover and comprehend data while also ensuring that access to the data is secure. The integration of Alation and TrustLogix enables organizations to harness the strengths of both platforms, achieving trusted, cataloged data through Alation, while TrustLogix ensures that the trusted data does not get exfiltrated as it moves across multiple platforms, enforcing secure data access based on the right entitlements. The integrated solution thus enables enterprises to quickly unlock the power of data.
Large enterprises in verticals such as manufacturing and healthcare with massive and critically sensitive data sets across multi-cloud data sources utilize the combined solution to leverage Alation’s metadata and enable fine-grained and dynamic access based on attributes like usage purpose, data type, and more through TrustLogix.
Alation is the industry leader in Data Intelligence, providing artificial intelligence-driven data search and discovery, classification, governance, and analytics capabilities to help organizations foster a data culture. TrustLogix provides a cloud-native and proxyless Cloud Data Security platform for monitoring and enforcing fine-grained data access control policies to secure data in cloud platforms like Snowflake, Redshift, and Databricks. The joint solution combines these powerful capabilities to empower mutual customers to use Alation’s classification and Data Catalog as part of TrustLogix Access Policies, security monitoring, and recommendations.
This integration delivers many critical benefits to joint Alation-TrustLogix customers:
This blog will explain how this technical integration benefits both business and data users by simplifying data discovery, enhancing security, and driving better business outcomes through faster, safer data access.
The Alation-TrustLogix integration delivers powerful benefits to accelerate and secure the most valuable assets in joint customer environments.
With Alation, business data owners can classify and tag information based on its sensitivity and risk. Based on the data's contents, PII, financial, healthcare, and other information are appropriately tagged as such. This streamlines compliance, strengthens security, simplifies audits, and ensures that only authorized users access high-risk data. Accurate classification also supports AI-driven processes that rely on well-organized data. Metadata is a powerful means to monitor critical assets and manage access control policies. TrustLogix provides a data security and security governance layer that can be integrated with metadata from Alation for monitoring and data access control policies.
Alation Classification Tags to Enforce Access Policies - Dynamic Data Masking from TrustLogix
Alation helps customers organize their datasets into a user-friendly catalog so that their data consumers can easily navigate and request access to those datasets within a business context. Data owners and stewards can use Alation to select datasets for data access control policies, eliminating manual coding and reducing human error. Data ops experts and analysts can leverage those same datasets from within the TrustLogix console, streamlining security workflows for policy creation:
Leveraging Alation Data Catalog in TrustLogix Data Access Policies
By combining information from Alation and underlying cloud data source systems, TrustLogix empowers data owners and stewards to navigate and select datasets from Alation when designing data access control policies and combine them with roles and security controls from the underlying cloud data platforms like Snowflake and Redshift. For example, a data owner can now define a single policy from the TrustLogix interface that incorporates Alation metadata and classification tags, as well as Snowflake roles and privileges. The below example showcases a policy that grants a healthcare super admin access to patient claim/insurance data (PII) in a particular Snowflake dataset – while restricting access to the finance team:
The Alation-TrustLogix integration simplifies data security for data owners and stewards by eliminating the need for manual coding. Previously, admins had to understand Alation tags, datasets, and security constructs for platforms like Snowflake and Databricks, then manually write and execute SQL code for security policies. This process was complex and prone to errors. TrustLogix uses Alation’s catalog and tags to automatically generate and deploy security policies, following the data platform’s primitives and constructs (e.g., Snowflake, Redshift, S3). This ensures accurate enforcement without manual effort, reducing risks and improving efficiency. Now, the policy is automatically deployed to the underlying platform, and DataSecOps teams can have full confidence that policies are being modeled and enforced precisely as intended by the business.
As TrustLogix discovers dark (unused) data, overprivileged activity, and data exfiltration indicators, it leverages Alation’s Classification Tags to determine the sensitivity level of that data and spotlight high-risk areas for security and governance teams. These insights are accompanied by intelligent recommendations, allowing teams to prioritize their efforts on the most significant risks to the organization.
TrustLogix Data Security Posture Dashboard
Business data owners leverage Alation to make sensitive data easily available for their data scientists, analysts, and other consumers. TrustLogix offers a data security and governance layer that integrates with Alation's metadata to automate controls and enforce enterprise policies. Instead of completely blocking access for certain data consumers, users can query resources and receive relevant insights while sensitive objects are masked or obfuscated. Users will see data with appropriate levels of insight based on dynamic attributes like usage purpose, data type, time, and more. This continuous enforcement on cloud data platforms applies to any data consumer, whether accessing data from data science notebooks, analytical tools, or through Alation Compose, and it further reduces the need to use manual workflow steps to request or deny access to sensitive data. This automated process occurs at query time, ensuring data security while still providing necessary self-service access without overloading multiple teams with policy management responsibilities.
TrustLogix and Alation’s proactive approach to data security simplifies the responsibilities of data operations/analysts and security teams by ensuring that appropriate security monitoring and access control policies are set up to ensure that the data is both easily accessible and only accessible for authorized consumers. Want to learn more about how TrustLogix can help you streamline your data access and secure your sensitive data? Get a free data security assessment by registering for a free 90-day data protection service.