Satori

In today’s data-driven business landscape, organizations face a critical challenge: how to provide swift, frictionless access to data while maintaining robust security and compliance guardrails. As data volumes explode and regulations grow increasingly complex, traditional approaches to data access control have become significant bottlenecks, frustrating both data engineers and business users. Satori has emerged as a transformative solution to this challenge, offering a modern data access control platform that fundamentally reimagines how organizations secure and govern their data assets.

Modern enterprises generate and collect unprecedented volumes of data across diverse environments—from cloud data warehouses and data lakes to traditional databases and analytics platforms. This data represents enormous potential value, but only if the right people can access it efficiently while maintaining appropriate protections.

Traditional approaches to data access control have created significant pain points:

• Access Request Bottlenecks: Data teams become overwhelmed with manual access requests, creating weeks-long delays
• Static Permissions: Coarse-grained, role-based controls fail to address the nuanced requirements of modern data use
• Security Blind Spots: Organizations lack visibility into what sensitive data they have and how it’s being accessed
• Compliance Uncertainty: Manual processes make it difficult to verify consistent enforcement of regulatory requirements
• Cross-Platform Inconsistency: Different access models across various data platforms create security gaps and governance challenges

These challenges don’t merely slow down data initiatives—they fundamentally undermine an organization’s ability to become truly data-driven while maintaining appropriate governance.

Founded in 2019 by Eldad Chai and Yoav Cohen, Satori was built to address these challenges through a revolutionary approach to data access. The platform combines continuous data discovery, centralized policy management, and universal enforcement to create a seamless security layer across an organization’s entire data infrastructure.

Effective access control begins with comprehensive knowledge of what data exists and its sensitivity. Satori’s discovery engine:

• Maps data locations across cloud data warehouses, data lakes, and databases
• Identifies sensitive data using machine learning and pattern recognition
• Classifies data according to regulatory categories (PII, PHI, PCI) and business sensitivity
• Maintains current awareness through ongoing monitoring of data changes

This continuous discovery eliminates blind spots that plague traditional governance approaches, ensuring organizations maintain constant awareness of their sensitive data landscape.

Satori provides a unified policy framework that spans diverse data platforms:

• Centralized policy definition through an intuitive interface accessible to both technical and business users
• Fine-grained access controls based on user identity, data sensitivity, purpose, and context
• Dynamic data masking and tokenization that reveals only appropriate information based on user context
• Row-level security filtering data based on attributes like geography, department, or customer segment

This centralized approach eliminates policy fragmentation while enabling the nuanced controls required for modern data governance.

Unlike traditional security tools that prioritize control over usability, Satori emphasizes a frictionless experience:

• Self-service data access through an intuitive portal for requesting and receiving permissions
• Just-in-time access granting that eliminates waiting periods for appropriate requests
• Transparent operation that doesn’t require changes to existing queries or BI tools
• Minimal performance impact through optimized proxy architecture

This user-centric approach ensures that security enhances rather than impedes data utilization.

Satori provides unprecedented visibility into data access patterns:

• Universal audit logs capturing all data access across connected platforms
• Anomaly detection identifying unusual access patterns that may indicate security risks
• Compliance reporting with pre-built templates for common regulatory frameworks
• Usage analytics showing how data is being utilized across the organization

This visibility closes the governance loop, enabling continuous improvement of access strategies based on actual usage patterns.

Organizations implementing Satori have achieved dramatic improvements in both security posture and data team efficiency:

A global financial services company struggled with competing imperatives: accelerating analytics initiatives while maintaining strict regulatory compliance. Their manual access control process created weeks-long delays for data access, significantly impacting business agility.

After implementing Satori:

• Data access request fulfillment time decreased from 12-15 days to just 2 hours
• Data engineering time spent on access control fell by over 80%
• Security team gained complete visibility into sensitive data access across platforms
• Compliance reporting time for regulatory reviews decreased by 90%

These improvements came without compromising security—in fact, the granularity of controls actually increased while reducing administrative burden.

A healthcare technology company needed to balance innovation with strict patient privacy protections. Their challenge was providing appropriate access to de-identified patient data for research while maintaining HIPAA compliance.

Satori enabled them to:

• Automatically discover and classify PHI across diverse data repositories
• Implement dynamic de-identification based on user role and purpose
• Provide comprehensive audit trails for compliance documentation
• Reduce data access approval time from weeks to minutes

This transformation allowed them to accelerate research initiatives while strengthening privacy protections—proving that effective governance enables rather than impedes innovation.

A key strength of Satori is its seamless integration with the modern data ecosystem:

• Cloud data warehouses: Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, Azure Synapse
• Data lakes: Databricks, Amazon S3, Azure Data Lake
• Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle
• Analytics platforms: Tableau, Looker, Power BI

• Identity providers: Okta, Azure AD, Google Workspace, Auth0
• Security frameworks: NIST, ISO 27001, SOC 2
• Compliance standards: GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, PCI DSS

• Data catalogs: integrations with leading tools for enhanced metadata context
• Data observability: connections to monitoring solutions for comprehensive visibility
• Workflow systems: integrations with ticketing and approval systems

These integrations create a unified security layer that spans the entire data lifecycle, ensuring consistent protection regardless of where data resides or how it’s accessed.

Understanding Satori’s architecture helps explain its transformative impact:

Satori uses an agentless architecture that minimizes infrastructure changes:

• Lightweight proxy that sits between users and data platforms
• No agents to install on databases or user devices
• No changes to existing queries or applications
• Minimal performance overhead through optimized processing

This approach enables rapid implementation with minimal disruption to existing workflows.

When users access data, Satori’s enforcement mechanism:

• Intercepts queries before they reach data platforms
• Evaluates applicable policies based on user, data, and context
• Applies necessary transformations (masking, filtering)
• Forwards modified queries to the underlying data platform
• Logs all activity for audit and compliance purposes

This dynamic enforcement ensures that protections are applied consistently regardless of access path.

Satori implements sophisticated ABAC that considers multiple dimensions:

• User attributes: Role, department, project, clearance level
• Data attributes: Sensitivity classification, regulatory category, owner
• Contextual attributes: Time, location, purpose of use
• Behavioral attributes: Usage patterns, access history, anomaly indicators

This multi-dimensional approach enables precisely tailored access decisions that align with organizational policies and regulatory requirements.

While Satori provides powerful technology, successful implementation requires a thoughtful approach aligned with organizational objectives:

Rather than attempting to redefine all access controls immediately, successful organizations typically begin with specific high-impact scenarios:

• Streamlining access to customer data for analytics teams
• Implementing consistent controls for financial reporting data
• Enabling self-service access to product usage data
• Enforcing geography-specific data residency requirements

These focused implementations deliver immediate value while establishing patterns for broader adoption.

Effective access control requires a clear but practical data classification approach:

• Start with 3-5 sensitivity levels that align with business context
• Focus initially on regulatory categories with clear requirements
• Use automated discovery to validate classification assumptions
• Refine the framework based on actual data findings

This pragmatic approach prevents classification from becoming an overwhelming task while providing necessary structure for access decisions.

Successful data access control requires collaboration across traditionally siloed functions:

• Data teams: Providing technical expertise and implementation support
• Security and compliance: Defining control requirements and validating effectiveness
• Business units: Clarifying data needs and access requirements
• Executive leadership: Establishing priorities and driving cultural alignment

Satori’s business-friendly interface facilitates this collaboration by making access policies understandable to all stakeholders.

As data ecosystems continue to evolve, Satori is expanding its capabilities to address emerging challenges:

As organizations increasingly leverage AI, access control must extend to model development and operation:

• Controlling access to training data based on sensitivity and purpose
• Tracking data lineage from source to model to output
• Implementing ethical guidelines for AI development
• Ensuring appropriate controls for automated decision processes

These capabilities help organizations develop AI responsibly with appropriate data protections.

The shift toward real-time analytics introduces new access control challenges:

• Applying consistent policies to streaming data
• Balancing protection with low-latency requirements
• Monitoring access patterns across batch and real-time systems
• Ensuring consistent governance regardless of data velocity

Satori’s expansion into these areas ensures comprehensive protection across diverse data processing paradigms.

As security models evolve toward zero-trust principles, Satori is implementing:

• Continuous authentication and authorization for data access
• Risk-based access decisions that adapt to changing conditions
• Just-in-time permissioning that minimizes standing access
• Behavioral analytics to detect and respond to suspicious activity

These capabilities align data access control with modern security architectures, ensuring appropriate protection in increasingly complex environments.

In the modern data landscape, effective access control has transformed from a security function to a strategic business capability. Satori’s approach fundamentally reshapes how organizations think about data protection—shifting from restrictive controls that impede innovation to intelligent guardrails that enable responsible use.

By combining continuous discovery, unified policy management, and frictionless access, Satori allows organizations to achieve what previously seemed contradictory: accelerating data utilization while strengthening security and compliance. This transformation converts data governance from a business constraint to a business enabler, allowing organizations to unlock the full value of their data assets while maintaining appropriate protections.

As data continues to grow in both volume and strategic importance, platforms like Satori will become essential components of the modern data infrastructure—not just as security tools but as foundational elements of data strategy that enable organizations to balance innovation and protection in an increasingly data-driven world.

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