As businesses increasingly migrate to the cloud to support modern workloads, the complexity of managing access control across multiple environments has grown significantly. Ensuring that only the right people and systems can access sensitive data requires careful planning and reliable tools.

At ALTR, we recognize the importance of managing permissions effectively. Cloud environments provide unmatched flexibility and scalability, but with this freedom comes the challenge of maintaining a strong security posture across dynamic, distributed systems. In this article, we’ll explore how ALTR’s Data Access Governance solution helps organizations manage permissions across diverse and constantly evolving cloud environments.

The Importance of Access Control in Cloud Environments

Cloud adoption has reshaped the way organizations manage and secure their data. Access control is foundational to any cloud security strategy, defining who can interact with which resources, and what actions they can take. Unfortunately, as cloud environments grow and evolve, the ways in which they are governed often become increasingly complex and difficult to manage. Ensuring that access control stays consistent in the cloud is a difficult task, and that’s where ALTR comes in.

The ALTR Approach to Cloud Access Control

ALTR offers a comprehensive Data Access Governance solution designed to manage and control access to sensitive data in cloud environments. ALTR Locks handle role-based data access management decisions and can be edited in real time using our code-free UI or easy to use API. Our Thresholds add dynamic functionality to our Locks, allowing context-based access management. If data should only be accessed at certain times, from certain IP addresses, or in certain quantities, Thresholds can help you easily achieve that functionality. ALTR also offers real-time logs, allowing visibility into what data is being accessed, when, and by who. These logs help many of our clients meet audit requirements in the cloud.

Key Features of ALTR’s Data Access Governance

Real-Time, Data-Level Access Control with Locks

ALTR allows users, through an API as well as through our website’s code-free UI, the ability to create and manage data access policies in real time. Users can build rules around their data by selecting what data they are governing, who can access it, and in what form it is returned. For example, you can allow an administrator to see email columns, while partially obscuring them to the sales team, and fully obscuring the data to all other roles. These data governance decisions can be created and edited on the ALTR platform, and the associated data masks will be adjusted in real-time.

Context-Aware and Dynamic Permissions with Thresholds

Cloud environments are dynamic—users, services, and systems are constantly changing, and access permissions must adapt to these shifts. Using ALTR’s thresholds, users can define policies that protect data given certain contexts.

For example, ALTR’s thresholds can ensure that access to critical financial data is only allowed during working hours or can prevent certain roles from accessing too many rows per hour. If an attempt to access sensitive data is made from an unusual location or at an odd time, ALTR can automatically block access or prompt additional authentication.

Multi-Cloud Integration

Building consistent infrastructure when using multiple cloud providers can often be an impassable hurdle. ALTR’s lightweight design helps ease this process. ALTR connects directly to your data source regardless of cloud provider, and supports connecting multiple data sources as well, allowing you to manage congruent security policies across multiple cloud providers from one source. Additionally, our audit logs can be exported to one place regardless of data source, allowing data access across multiple cloud environments to be easily monitored.

Compliance-Ready Security

Whether you are subject to GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, or any other data privacy and protection regulation, ALTR is built to help you stay compliant. By managing access at the data level and providing comprehensive audit trails, ALTR ensures that organizations can demonstrate compliance with the most stringent regulatory standards. (Just ask our customers). 

ALTR’s logging and reporting features enable easy tracking of data access activities, making it simpler to prepare for audits and comply with security regulations. Automated alerts and notifications can be set up to flag any suspicious access patterns or potential policy violations, ensuring that your organization can respond promptly to potential security threats.

How ALTR Solves Cloud Access Control Challenges

The cloud is a flexible and scalable platform, but it also introduces significant security challenges. ALTR’s Data Access Governance solution directly addresses the most common challenges businesses face:

1. Over-Privileged Access

Too often, users and services are granted excessive permissions that go beyond what is necessary for their tasks. With ALTR’s fine-grained access controls and least privilege enforcement, businesses can ensure that access to sensitive data is restricted to only those who need it, helping reduce the risk of over-privileged accounts and potential security breaches.

2. Difficulty Maintaining Compliance

For organizations subject to rigorous regulatory frameworks, maintaining compliance in cloud environments can be overwhelming. ALTR’s audit logging and near-real-time activity monitoring help businesses stay ahead of compliance requirements, ensuring that their cloud environments are continuously in line with data privacy regulations.

3. Dynamic Cloud Environments

Cloud environments are constantly evolving, with new resources being created and users being added or modified frequently. ALTR ensures that as the cloud environment grows and changes, data policy and visibility is maintained and easily editable. Many organizations face issues of complex data policies collapsing under their own weight when companies grow and shift. This is the exact problem that ALTR attempts to solve using our lightweight and easy to use platform. Instead of complex masking policies requiring entire data teams to manage, our platform has pre-built extensible solutions that grow with you.

Wrapping Up

Cloud access control is not just about who can log into an environment—it’s about ensuring the right users, services, and applications can only access the data they need, when they need it, and under the right circumstances. With ALTR, organizations can effectively manage access to sensitive data across complex cloud environments while ensuring compliance, reducing risks, and enforcing the principle of least privilege.

By offering near-real-time, data-level access control and powerful auditing capabilities, ALTR helps businesses navigate the complexities of cloud security with ease. With ALTR, managing access control across your cloud environments has never been simpler or more secure. Instead of cloud scalability demanding heavy infrastructure and upkeep costs, ALTR ensures that your security scales with you.

If you’re ready to enhance your cloud access control strategy and ensure that your sensitive data is protected, reach out to ALTR today to learn more about our Data Access Governance platform.