For many organisations, Active Directory (AD) is a cornerstone of their IT infrastructure, responsible for managing access to applications, systems, and increasingly, data. However, while AD excels in governing access to applications, its limitations become clear when used to manage data access for AI and analytics workloads. These environments demand fine-grained access controls that AD was not originally designed for, leading to slow and frustrating access request workflows and data security blind spots.
In this article, we’ll explore the five biggest challenges of managing data access through Active Directory, and how Raito’s platform addresses these issues to deliver faster, safer, and more efficient data access governance workflows.
A common frustration for users needing data access is the time it takes to get it. Typically, users must submit a ticket to the IT team, who are responsible for adding them to the appropriate AD group. Since IT is often understaffed and data access is not always the highest organisational priority, users can experience significant delays, especially in larger organisations.
Moreover, Data Platforms and Active Directory are often managed by different teams, complicating any potential workarounds for these slow processes.
How Raito Helps:
Raito offers a solution by enabling data product owners to grant temporary access to users while they wait for AD group assignments. Users can access the data they need immediately, and once added to the AD group, Raito automatically revokes the temporary access. This seamless, time-bound access ensures that all data governance policies are respected while maintaining agility in the organisation.
One of the critical limitations of AD is its lack of visibility into data access. Users are granted access through groups, but it can be difficult—if not impossible—to track which specific data a group member can access. This lack of insight poses a serious compliance risk, especially under privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, security regulations such as DORA and NIS2 and AI regulations such as the EU AI Act, where organizations must be able to report on data access with confidence.
How Raito Helps:
Raito’s platform correlates native access controls from cloud data providers with group information from identity providers like AD, offering unparalleled visibility into who has access to what data. This transparency is powered by Raito’s Data Security Graph, which provides a clear, real-time view of access and usage across the organisation.
Managing data access via Active Directory is largely a manual process. Users request access, and someone on the IT team adds them to the appropriate group. This manual method is not only time-consuming but also prone to human error.
How Raito Helps:
With Raito, organisations can automate much of this process. Access policies can be set up to dynamically grant or mask data access based on user and data attributes. Time-bound access can be automatically granted or revoked based on pre-defined rules, reducing the need for constant manual intervention and allowing users to get access faster.
Over time, as more users are added to more AD groups, managing these groups becomes unwieldy. The proliferation of groups—often referred to as “group explosion”—makes it increasingly difficult to manage access cleanly, leading to bloated group hierarchies that are cumbersome to maintain.
How Raito Helps:
Raito’s insights into access and usage help organizations identify which AD groups are underutilized or redundant, allowing for periodic cleanups. Additionally, Raito allows you to logically group users at the Data Product level, reducing reliance on AD groups for day-to-day access management.
As a result of group explosion and inefficiencies in access management, users often end up with broad and excessive privileges. Whether it's due to overlapping group memberships or granting blanket access to groups, this can create security risks by giving users more access than they need.
How Raito Helps:
Raito’s fine-grained access controls and identity-centric monitoring make it easier to enforce "just enough" and "just in time" access policies. By offering precise control over who can access what data, and for how long, Raito ensures that excessive permissions are a thing of the past.
In a rapidly changing world where timely access to data is critical, but cloud infrastructure is increasingly under attack, efficient data access governance workflows are essential. Raito’s unique architecture not only integrates with your existing AD infrastructure but enhances it with the agility, visibility, and automation required to thrive in today’s data-driven environment.
By addressing these five key challenges, Raito ensures that your organisation can govern data access securely and efficiently—no matter how complex your AD setup might be.
Talk to an expert to learn more about how Raito helps organisations overcome Active Directory limitations, or learn how our customers use Raito to secure access to data products.
