Reconsidering The Abac Vs. Rbac Debate

By Author: Appsian
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There is an active debate between the various approaches to the implementation of data access controls as businesses migrate their analytical workloads to the cloud in shared environments, especially whether attribute-based access control (ABAC) provides superior protection and governance than role-based access control (RBAC).
The efficacy of IT solutions may not be based on only one criterion, making the ABAC versus RBAC debate misguided for many practitioners because modern data infrastructures are becoming increasingly sophisticated and complex.
Which solution for data access control is best?
The response to this question (ABAC vs. RBAC) depends on which strategy for your company is most successful. Various solutions currently on the market can be compared only concerning their ability to allow administrators to make data widely accessible in their organizations and comply with business and privacy regulations without adversely affecting the efficiency of the data platform.
The use cases of companies, current infrastructure, familiarity with different cloud environments, and the user learning curve ...
... are just a few factors that make the ABAC vs. RBAC debate one-dimensional. Companies are less concerned with whether the approach is focused on role- or attribute-based controls in the center of digital transformation programs and more concerned with how rapidly they can move current data and access control policies to the cloud.
But let's start with the market's current state and a few misconceptions. Hybrid architectures are being introduced by the majority of businesses transitioning to the cloud. Such businesses either have a conventional database on-site deployment, such as Teradata, DB2 Oracle, etc., or they have a data lake based on Hadoop that they want to move to the cloud to take advantage of reduced operating burden, improved agility, and elasticity.
Data access control must easily integrate with existing business processes
It becomes increasingly difficult to transfer as data accumulates; this is also true for policies for data access. Companies are spending considerable effort and money over a long period of time to develop specific access management policies. Such access policies are simply part of and represent the way they do business. It is, therefore, unfair to expect businesses transitioning to the cloud to abandon all of their current data governance policies and begin to reinvent them in the cloud from scratch. On the opposite, they are concerned about exploiting their on-site data lake access policies for their cloud environments.
Will the access control choice speed up secure data sharing?
A more practical way of analyzing this ABAC vs. RBAC debate for data managers is to decide if the approach they are using helps speed up access to data for data analysts and data scientists with appropriate controls in place.
Conclusion
According to a McKinsey survey, 69 percent of organizations say that "implementing strict security guidelines and code review procedures can significantly slow developers." This is particularly alarming since the speed and agility of data access and analysis is one of the primary drivers of cloud migration. Under such circumstances, enterprises should go for latest data security solutions that deliver an RBAC-ABAC hybrid approach to access control. This greatly enhances their access management efficiency and also significantly improves data security. It also helps enterprises in compliance management by enabling them to adhere to data privacy guidelines.

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