Welcome to the UserClouds Docs!

UserClouds is a data protection layer that makes monitoring and controlling data access simple. The layer mediates access to sensitive data, enforcing best practices in data protection. It can be deployed in several distinct areas of your stack, depending on your use case.

Our Product Guides provide high-level narrative and information about our product suite. For detailed technical documentation, check out our API Reference.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out to [email protected].

Key Functionality

The safety layer:

Enforces next-gen access policies, such as rate limiting, data residency and open ticket checks
Minimizes, masks or tokenizes data, reducing your data perimeter and lessening the severity of potential breaches
Logs data access, reducing time-to-detection and simplifying audits

Use Cases

You may use UserClouds to apply best practices like:

Rate limiting: to reduce account takeover risk, employees may only access data at a human rate
Data residency: only allow data access in the target user’s home region
Open ticket checks: only allow employees to access a customer's PHI if they are assigned to an open support ticket for that user
Role & permission checks: only allow access by users with role x / permission y
IP checks: only allow access on the company VPN
User consent checks: only allow access if the user has consented to the specified purpose
Data minimization or masking: inject noise, categorize the data or mask all but the last 4 digits of an SSN
Data tokenization: replace data with a secure, but resolvable, reference token
Logging of the who, why, when and how of data access

Benefits

UserClouds helps you reliably & programmatically enforce data protection practices on every data flow. It reduces the need for custom, governance-related code across systems and languages, improving:

Engineering Velocity: Since privacy and access-related code is centralized, maintenance and update costs are minimized and can be performed by a single team. The goal is to minimize the engineering resources wasted on maintaining distributed glue code, manual clean-up work and human approval flows - so that engineers can focus on the mission.
Data Security: Data sprawl is minimized and data access can easily be turned off in case of a breach. Security-related code is much more easily audited, so it is easier to identify flaws in the logic. An audit log of data access is maintained automatically.
Privacy Posture: UserClouds is designed to make adhering privacy regulation like CCPA and GDPR as simple as possible. Data misuse is minimized, data residency adherence is simplified and data subject requests are served trivially.