Why a data marketplace guarantees the security of your data

Increasing data consumption is vital to improving efficiency, driving greater innovation and boosting productivity. Organizations are therefore looking to share their data more widely, with employees and external stakeholders to scale consumption and deliver value.

However, at the same time data needs to be kept secure. Data assets can contain personally identifiable information that has to be protected from unauthorized internal and external access, while security measures must ensure compliance with regulations such as the GDPR and CCPA. Failure to safeguard data can lead to hacking and ransomware attacks, legal fines, reputational damage and lost revenues.

Sharing data through an Opendatasoft data marketplace enables organizations to balance increasing consumption with the highest levels of security and control due to eight key features:

If data is scattered across the organization and stored in locations such as individual hard drives or departmental servers it is difficult to control or protect. Data can be duplicated, out-of-date or held or accessed insecurely. By centralizing data and enabling access through a single point, Opendatasoft removes the security and compliance threats of data being stored locally, outside the control of data teams.

Ensuring that users have access to the data they need can involve complex and time-consuming administrative processes. Opendatasoft streamlines access management workflows, with administrators able to manage user access rights and permissions at a granular level. The solution enables the creation of user groups (such as specific departments) with tailored permissions, with the ability to select users in bulk to modify their groups or access rights to minimize administration time. 

If access to a data asset is restricted, users simply request access through a single click or call to action on the data page. This is immediately routed to the Opendatasoft back office so that the data owner can grant or deny the request.

To enable greater collaboration, organizations can temporarily invite users (such as contractors or people outside the business) to access specific data assets, setting time limits to ensure security once the project is completed.

Different users require different levels of access to data, even within the same dataset. For example, an employee in accounts will need to be able to access customer billing details in a sales data asset, something that is not required for a member of the marketing team. Opendatasoft provides granular access permissions to specific rows and columns within a dataset, balancing confidentiality and usability.

Authentication to your Opendatasoft data marketplace is automatically synchronized with your company directory. This means that administrators don’t have to manually add the details of users and any corporate changes, such as employees leaving or moving department, are automatically reflected in the data marketplace. Single sign-on with SAML and OpenID Connect allows all employees, customers and partners to connect to the platform just using their business email address.

As a SaaS solution, Opendatasoft partners with leading cloud providers, such as AWS. As well as reliability and scalability this increases security and protection, with our cloud partners dedicating significant resources to delivering best in class security methods, with complete 24/7 infrastructure monitoring to help ensure data confidentiality, integrity, and availability. 

The Opendatasoft back office provides a complete, centralized record of all permissions applied for, granted or denied. This feeds into corporate reporting and delivers a complete audit trail for every data asset. This can be used to provide evidence for compliance with regulations such as the GDPR and CCPA, and to ensure monitoring and security around data use. Data lineage features enable administrators to see how data is being reused, further increasing control and security.

Opendatasoft makes it easy to customize security settings to your specific requirements. For example you can easily apply organizational security rules, such as around the protection of sensitive information, to your data marketplace to control who has access, as well as anonymizing specific fields.  Administrators can make the data catalog private or public in just a few clicks and configure API call quotas for all anonymous users to give an added level of control.

The Opendatasoft data marketplace integrates and supports corporate data governance. It enforces access management policies and permissions while ensuring that data assets meet corporate standards around data confidentiality, reliability and accuracy. Through automated integration with the wider data stack, information within the data marketplace is updated in real-time, immediately reflecting the impact of changes made in other tools while adhering to corporate security protocols.

Find out more about how Opendatasoft can help protect your data by contacting our experts.