Security and access are top issues for data engineers

More than half (54 percent) of respondents to a new survey say securing data with appropriate access rights is one of their biggest hurdles. While almost 60 percent believe their organizations should be placing extra emphasis on data security.

The third annual State of Data Engineering Survey from Immuta also finds that that 89 percent of organizations report missing business opportunities because of data access bottlenecks.

Although data is increasingly seen as a key business resource organizations surveyed report only using an average of 58 percent of their data in decision making. The disconnect between security and access negatively impacts data engineers' daily lives too, with 40 percent claiming that managing data access makes them feel burnt out.

"As data moves from on-premises to the cloud, this clear disconnect between data security and access not only hurts organizations' data-driven initiatives and business outcomes, but also increases their risk of data leaks and breaches," says Matthew Carroll, CEO of Immuta. "To better support data teams when it comes to bridging these disconnects, CISOs need to step in and become more of an enabler of the modern data stack. This will require security and data leaders to work more closely with their teams to prioritize balancing security and access effectively."

Among other findings, more than half (63 percent) of data professionals report not having complete visibility over who has access to what data. Responses to which team is responsible for validating policy compliance with regulations also vary greatly between the IT team (40 percent), security team (14 percent), data team (14 percent), compliance team (12 percent), privacy team (12 percent) and legal team (nine percent), showing the lack of a standardized process across organizations.

While 68 percent expect over two-thirds of their data to live in the cloud by 2024, 41 percent report that they don't have enough people to manage or analyze their data, and 36 percent express concerns about having too much data. In addition 51 percent of data professionals claim current data access control policies limit their ability to scale secure data access.

You can get the full report on the Immuta site.

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