In today’s distributed data environment, the “Geringste Privilegien” model—ensuring individuals and systems have only the minimum access necessary—is the gold standard for security. Yet, achieving it is often easier said than done. Security teams are facing an unmanageable volume of permissions, where reviewing thousands of entitlements across users, roles, and groups is not manually scalable. Worse, there is often a lack of context: it’s overwhelming to manage access without knowing which data is sensitive, regulated, or business-critical.
To solve this, organizations must shift from a centralized bottleneck to a decentralized approach, empowering the people who know the data best: the Data Owners. Here is a practical, 5-step journey to reducing your attack surface and conducting effective entitlements reviews, mapped to the BigID products that make it possible.
Step 1: Focus on Active, Sensitive Data
Die Herausforderung: You cannot protect what you cannot see. Trying to review access for every file in the organization is a recipe for fatigue.
Die Lösung: Prioritize. Identify the data that matters the most—sensitive, regulated, and critical business data—and focus your efforts there.
- BigID Product: Data Discovery & Classification.
- How it helps: BigID scans your entire data estate (cloud, on-prem, SaaS) to discover and classify sensitive information. This gives you the context needed to filter out noise and focus reviews only on high-risk data.
Step 2: Reduce Your Data Footprint
Die Herausforderung: Data hoarding leads to increased risk. Stale, unused data often retains old permissions that are no longer monitored.
Die Lösung: Delete or archive unused and stale data before you even begin the access review. If the data doesn’t exist, it can’t be exposed.
- BigID Product: Aufbewahrung von Daten und Data Deletion.
- How it helps: By automating retention policies, BigID helps you identify and dispose of data that has outlived its business value. This significantly reduces the volume of files that data owners need to review.
Step 3: Remove Stale Access
Die Herausforderung: Over time, users accumulate permissions they no longer use, creating “dormant” access paths that attackers can exploit.
Die Lösung: Revoke unused or stale permissions immediately.
- BigID Product: Access Intelligence.
- How it helps: BigID identifies permissions that haven’t been used in a long time. You can automate the revocation of these obvious “stale” permissions without needing a human decision, further clearing the deck for the manual review.
Step 4: Minimize Overexposure
Die Herausforderung: Some of the highest risks come from broad access settings that are easily overlooked, such as files shared via public links or accessible to “Everyone” in the organization.
Die Lösung: Remediate open access and external access to sensitive data before asking data owners to intervene. This immediately reduces the attack surface.
- BigID Product: Zugang zur Intelligenz & DSPM (Data Security Posture Management) .
- How it helps: BigID detects and flags overexposed data, identifying open access and external access to sensitive information. Security teams can lock down these high-risk exposures globally, ensuring that only specific, necessary users remain for the final review.
Step 5: Rightsize Permissions (The Human Layer)
Die Herausforderung: Once the obvious risks are automated away, you are left with legitimate users who may still have excessive privileges. Validating this requires a business context that security teams lack.
Die Lösung: Empower Data Owners to review and validate the remaining access to ensure a true Least Privilege model.
- BigID Product: Delegated Remediation App.
- How it helps: This is where the rubber meets the road. BigID shifts the burden from the security team to the Data Owners via a streamlined, automated workflow. Owners can easily review current entitlements and decide whether to “Keep” or “Revoke” permissions.
Abschluss
By combining automated reduction of the data surface with a Delegated Entitlements Review, organizations can move from a chaotic, volume-heavy mess to a streamlined, secure Least Privilege model.
Ready to reduce your attack surface? Identify your sensitive data, clean up the stale and open access, and put the power back in the hands of your Data Owners with BigID.
Connect with one of our data security experts today. Schedule a 1:1 here to get started!
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