Holistics Crash Course #1: Data Governance with Holistics

On May 21st 2018, the Holistics team hosted a webinar about controlling data access in organizations. In this article, you will find the webinar recording and the summarized key webinar takeaways.

Holistics Data Access Permissions gives you simple and elegant data security over multiple levels. With extensive permissions and data access control capabilities, you can:

• Control how and which groups get access to specific reports and data sources
• Restrict the data displayed to the different user groups

This lets you use the exact same data reports and dashboards for your various permission groups, keeping navigation through your various reports simple while improving data security for your organization.

Data Accessibility vs. Data Security

There’s an ideal of a Data Driven Culture, where we want our team to be able to make better business decisions with data. This needs a convenient and easy way for members to access the information as quickly as they can when they need it, which makes data accessibility crucial for organizations. However, its downside is the risk of data leakages or data security breaches. Like Yin and Yang, or a yoga master, balancing these priorities is a critical challenge that needs to be resolved continuously.

One of the common approaches to controlling data access is to create numerous different reports for different teams, but this also means you will end up with many reports, leading to increased chances of leakages and errors. The more permissions maintenance setups you have to deal with, the more complex it will be for you to control data access. So how can you start out with a fuss free permissions setup that is scalable and able to progress with your company's security needs over time?

This is where Holistics' data access control comes in: Striking the balance between facilitating the simplicity of data accessibility, with the increased governance friction that occurs when you start implementing more data controls. Holistics takes care of permission controls on our front-end, so you don’t have to worry about back-end complications. Here is how Holistics helps you with controlling data access:

1. Managing access to reports/dashboards.
2. Managing access to Data Sources.
3. Managing access to data inside reports/dashboards.

1. Managing access to reports/dashboards

You can manage data access to reports and dashboards by assigning Holistics User Roles and Groups.

There are 3 roles in Holistics:

• Business User: Can only view reports/dashboards that are shared with them.
• Analyst: Can create and edit reports/dashboards.
• Admin: Have full control over resources and management.

Admins can create Groups and organize users into different categories. One user can be grouped into one or many categories, and each report/dashboard could be shared to one or many groups.

With this feature, you will have the ability to manage team-level permissions (e.g. country specific access, Sales, Finance, Marketing department access) to reports/dashboards. You can read more in our docs here, or watch a video example of How to Control Report and Folder Access by Country and Departments here.

User Groups can also help you to control access to data inside reports. Continue reading to learn more!

2. Managing access to data sources

Holistics allows Admins to manage Analysts’ permissions to data sources, allowing analysts to only create reports or run queries with data sources that have been shared with them.

Note that even if a data source is shared to an analyst, she/he cannot view or modify database credentials or details for that data source.

For more, see our docs here.

3. Managing access to data inside reports/dashboards

Using our custom Holistics permissions syntax, Admins and Analysts can use simple SQL queries to restrict and control access to the data inside reports. There are two levels of control:

• Filter permissions: Control the values that appear in filters by each User Group, so as to limit can be selected while viewing reports. For example: Data Scientist team can only access the data from last year (date restriction), or the Singapore team can only see data for Singapore’s customers.
• Column-level data access control: Control which columns can be shown for each User Group. For example: show personally identifiable information data to only manager-and-above users, or show sensitive data to management only.

To see hands-on examples in action, watch this Advanced Data Source and Filter Permissions video section of our webinar.

Webinar Details (Past event)

Session Agenda: Monday, May 21st 2018, 10AM GMT+8 (Singapore)

• 5 mins: General update and quick sharing
• 30 mins: Permissions syntax how-to and use-cases
• 10 mins: Q&A + Next webinar use-case

Content outline:

• Rows and records based views
• Columns based views
• If-user group / Date-limited view

Webinar examples:

• Regional manager use-case: Segregating country managers and different department users (Rows and records based)
• Privileged user group that sees everything, and everyone else sees just one column (Column based)

References:

• Permissions feature page
• Permissions documentation page
• Permissions video guide page