Building and Enforcing NIST 800-53 Compliant Access Control on Databricks

A wall of permissions stood between your team and the data. You need it fast, but you need it right. NIST 800-53 access control isn’t optional—it’s the baseline for security in any serious environment. On Databricks, enforcing it is where precision meets scale.

NIST 800-53 sets strict requirements for controlling who can see, change, and move data. In Databricks, these controls must cover users, groups, notebooks, clusters, jobs, and tables. You define policies for identification, authentication, and authorization. No action without a verified identity. No data without explicit permission. This is how you meet AC family controls in the NIST framework—AC-2 for account management, AC-3 for access enforcement, AC-6 for least privilege, AC-17 for remote access, and more.

Start by integrating Databricks with your identity provider. Use SAML or SCIM to sync users and groups from a central directory. Map roles to NIST 800-53 requirements. Enforce multifactor authentication at the IdP level. Inside Databricks, tighten workspace permissions so every object, from cluster to notebook, is assigned least-privilege access. Monitor changes with audit logs to ensure compliance with AC-7 and AU family controls.

The data layer needs equal rigor. Implement table ACLs, credential passthrough, and Unity Catalog to bind access to data assets directly to the same identity policy. Lock down jobs by limiting which service principals can run them. Tag sensitive datasets and apply row- and column-level security to meet the NIST 800-53 principle of separation of duties. Review policies regularly to remove stale accounts and unneeded permissions.

Automation is key. Manual policy updates at scale lead to drift and failure. Use infrastructure-as-code for Databricks workspace configuration. Test policy changes before deployment. Reconcile with compliance reports generated from Databricks audit logs to prove adherence for any AC control. This closes the loop between the NIST 800-53 control catalog and real Databricks operations.

NIST 800-53 Databricks access control is not theory—it’s implementation detail, enforceable from the workspace level down to individual data rows. It keeps breaches out and trust intact.

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