Data access control is a fundamental security capability that determines who or what can access resources, particularly sensitive data, in a computing system. There are different types of access control. A key design decision for any system is whether to implement centralized or decentralized data access.
Centralized data access consolidates all access control logic and decisions into a single authoritative system. Decentralized data access distributes policies, decisions, and enforcement across individual system entities. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages, ultimately the goal of each type of data access control is to ensure prevent unauthorized access and data leaks.
This article provides a detailed overview of each data access methodology by covering the following topics:
What is Decentralized Data Access?
Decentralized data access distributes the authorization of access requests across different entities in a system. When an access request comes in, the receiving entity evaluates the identity, roles (role based access control – rbac), attributes (attribute based access control – abac) , relationships, and other contextual factors related to the request. Using this context, along with configured permissions or rules, the entity decides the level of access.
This distributed decision-making avoids any centralized bottleneck or single point of failure. The entities themselves have the logic and permissions required to evaluate requests as they arrive and grant access accordingly. There is no need to funnel all requests through a centralized data access system. Instead organizations can implement self-service and just-in-time data access which improves the time-to-value from data.
Benefits of Decentralized Data Access
A few key benefits set decentralized data access apart from centralized data access. These benefits include:
- No single point of failure: With no central system, there is no security risk of that system going down and preventing all access.
- Flexibility to adapt: Entities can dynamically adapt to context and grant permissions on the fly.
- Scalability: Adding more entities increases authorization capacity naturally.
- Speed: Local decisions avoid request routing latency to a central system.
- Resilience: Compromise of individual entities has limited impact versus a central system
Challenges of Decentralized Data Access
Distributing data access decision-making also poses a few challenges including:
- Complexity in managing policies across distributed entities
- Lack of unified visibility into access patterns
- Potential for inconsistent policy enforcement across entities
- Difficulty revoking access globally in a timely manner
- Relies on resilient peer-to-peer trust models
What is Centralized Data Access?
In centralized access control, all access requests are routed through a central access control system which evaluates the requests against predefined policies and rules. The central authority, usually a server or set of servers, acts as the single source of truth for data access across the full system. When end entities need to authenticate a user or authorize access to a resource, they defer to this central system rather than making decisions locally.
This central system stores all user data such as user accounts, credentials, policies, and permissions to assess the context of an access request. For example, it might check the user ID against a stored user profile, validate credentials, check group membership, evaluate access rules, and more. It uses the centralized data policy information to make simple permit/deny decisions and sends them back to the requesting entity.
Benefits of Centralized Access Control
By centralizing access control into a single system, organizations can maintain strict control over data access. A few key benefits include:
- Central point of authorization: A single logical system makes all access decisions simplifying data access monitoring.
- Global policy changes: With only one system, all access control policy changes receive a global roll out ensuring all data access meets current policies.
- Centralized access control offers strong data security because it concentrates all decisions in one hardened system.
- Visibility: Central logging enables full visibility into access patterns and events.
Challenges of Centralized Access Control
Some drawbacks and risks of centralized models include:
- The central authority is a single point of failure
- Limited scalability due to central request bottleneck
- Changes require updating centralized policies and configuration
- Lack of flexibility to adapt data access dynamically
- A compromised central system is catastrophic
Centralized vs. Decentralized Data Access
Centralized and decentralized models both have strengths and weaknesses that benefit different use cases. Here is an overview of the strengths and weaknesses of both centralized and decentralized access control.
Centralized Access Control
Centralized data access relies on a central authority to make all access control decisions based on predefined policies and configurations. Unified administration and control are enabled because you can manage and monitor all policies and activities from a single place. However, it also introduces a single point of failure – if the central authority is compromised, it can disable access control for the entire system.
Since changes require updating centralized policies, centralized systems also lack the flexibility to adapt data access dynamically based on context. The central authority can become a bottleneck that limits scalability for growth.
Decentralized Access Control
Decentralized access control distributes policies, logic, and decisions across multiple entities. This avoids a single point of failure and enables redundancy and resilience. Adding more entities increases scale. These systems can also assign access dynamically based on context instead of just predefined rules.
However, administration requires coordinating policies across distributed systems which results in less uniform control. Monitoring and auditing can also become more difficult without a central vantage point.
Read about how Managing Access to Data Got a Lot Easier
How to Choose Between Centralized and Decentralized Access Control
When designing an access control scheme, key factors to consider in choosing between centralized vs. decentralized include:
Evaluate the System Architecture
Review the overall system architecture and determine if it is fundamentally centralized or decentralized. Examine how components distribute data, logic, and communication flows. A decentralized architecture where components make autonomous decisions lends itself more to decentralized access control.
Identify Scalability and Flexibility Requirements
Analyze expected scalability needs and how flexible access control policies need to be. Consider future system growth and the need for dynamic, context-aware policies. Decentralized models generally scale better as the system expands by avoiding request bottlenecks. They also offer more dynamic, context-aware access decisions versus strict centralized policies.
Determine Coordination Needs
Identify how coordinated and consistent access control must be across the system. Is there a need for a unified view with tight control of all policies? If so, centralized models enable very tight coordination with a unified view.
Assess Monitoring and Auditing Demands
Evaluate the importance of centralized monitoring, reporting, and auditing of access activity. In cases where data compliance requires regular reporting and auditing, centralized systems make it easier to get a global view of all access events and changes.
Conclusion
Decentralized access control is emerging for distributed computing like blockchain, edge, and IoT. It avoids a central point of failure and scales control. However, centralized access control still dominates corporate IT where unified control is a priority. As computing architectures distribute, decentralized authorization provides important resilience and scalability advantages.
Satori’s Data Security Platform provides secure and compliant decentralized data access to ensure data protection that scales with your needs.
To learn more about how Satori can help you secure sensitive information while preserving time-to-value from data book a 30-minute consulting call with one of our experts.
