Unqork’s Role-Based Access Control feature promotes operational efficiency and improves regulatory compliance through the use of permissions.
At Unqork, we believe in empowering people with the resources to bring their own ideas to life. With a no-code platform, Unqork users are provided with the tools, templates, and integrations needed to build enterprise applications quickly. We recently rolled out a few updates to our Role-Based Access Control feature that will make managing security within your application even easier.
Challenges in Managing Access Control
In enterprise technology, security is an essential part of doing business. Clients trust large enterprises with their sensitive information and expect them to keep it safe. Configuring tiered data access on a need-to-know basis ensures that only users with certain roles in the organization can access confidential client data.
However, implementing this strategy in an application is often incredibly tedious and labor-intensive. Traditional development would require you to manually assign permissions and define hierarchies on a page-by-page basis, meaning that you’d likely have to perform the same actions multiple times. Time spent doing this doesn’t even account for all of the custom decisions that need to be made on individual pages and time spent maintaining this. Managing access should be effective, streamlined and most of all, simple.
Role-Based Access Control for Secure Operations
Comprehensive Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) allows you to manage access across your entire organization based on individual roles or groups. Suppose you have a project dealing with sensitive data that a variety of people from across your organization will be involved in. Managing access with RBAC means that you can optimize efficiency by only allowing parties to see the information most relevant to them. For example, you might use RBAC to model permissions such that a broker can only see fields A, B, and C, while an underwriter has access to fields A and D.
Perhaps more importantly, RBAC can also ensure that sensitive data is accessible only to the parties that should be authorized to see it. Imagine that you have a Sales team split into an East Coast group and a West Coast group. Within each group, there is a regional sales manager. With RBAC, you can easily model hierarchies to reflect your organizational structure — meaning that each individual salesperson can see their own quotas, but not their peers’ quotas; regional sales managers can see all sales quotas within their region; the global sales director can see quotas across all regions.
Instead of defining hierarchies and administering custom permissions on a case-by-case basis, RBAC allows you to set access controls once before applying them to all relevant parts of your application. This saves administrators and IT members valuable time, especially when it comes to structural changes, a hiring boom, or a project involving third-party users. By aligning the app with the organizational structure of the parent business or offering predefined roles to third-party users, team members can focus only on what pertains to them and be empowered to do their jobs more efficiently.
Since RBAC capabilities save time and optimize operational efficiency, organizations that use access control often see quantifiable financial benefits. In fact, RTI published a report which estimates that for a hypothetical financial services firm with 10,000 employees, implementing an RBAC system can save $24,000 annually in IT labor alone. Employee downtime due to increased operational efficiency was estimated to save the company another $300,000.
RBAC also facilitates better compliance with regulatory privacy and confidentiality requirements by giving IT teams and executives total control over data access and usage. When the time for auditing comes, there’s no question of who has done what in your enterprise’s system. To top it off, Unqork is SOC II compliant and built with security in mind. As a client, you never have to run shared infrastructure with other enterprises on the same cloud service, meaning that your security and privacy is always preserved.
What’s New in RBAC?
On the Unqork platform, the RBAC structure is divided into regulating “roles” and “groups.” Together they control various areas of your production applications. Roles provide default access to users but can be configured to allow customized access on a per-page basis. Groups control which users can view other users based on the hierarchy set-up in Role Administration.
Each user can only have one assigned role, but they can belong to multiple groups. Groups can automatically be assigned to entire roles. When negotiating these functions, it’s important to remember that role permissions impact what fields users can read and write to the server. If user permissions from two different groups happen to overlap, the user will be granted the higher level of access between the two groups.
Soon, RBAC will also allow you to control creators on the Designer side of the Unqork platform. This will include features like new Workspaces to separate different teams, as well as the ability to pick and choose what creators can change in settings. RBAC tools are the future in automated user control, and we’re continually looking to improve our features based on what our customers want to see next.
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