Roles and rights in Soda Cloud

Last modified on 26-Apr-24

To manage the actions of members that belong to a single organization, Soda Cloud uses roles and access rights. These roles and their associated rights of access enforce limits on the abilities for people to make additions and changes to datasets, to make changes to the Soda Cloud account, and to adjust the roles and rights of others.

Roles and rights in your account
Change organization roles and settings
Add multiple organizations
Access an audit trail
Access to resources
Default roles for datasets and checks
Change the default access to datasets
Change access to a dataset
Review member licenses
Data source, dataset, agreement, and check owners
Go further

Roles and rights in your account

Anyone with access to your organization’s Soda Cloud account is known as a member. The roles that define the type of access members have to your organization’s Soda Cloud account are Admin and User. If you are the first member in your organization to sign up for Soda Cloud, you become the Admin for the account by default.

The following table outlines the account-related rights of each role.

Change organization roles and settings

An Admin is the only role that can make changes to the Organization Settings and to the role assignments in the organization. Note, you can have more than one Admin associated with an organization in Soda Cloud.

As an Admin, login to your Soda Cloud account and navigate to your avatar > Organization Settings. Only Admins can view Organization Settings.

Add multiple organizations

You may find it useful to set up multiple organizations in Soda Cloud so that each corresponds with a different environment in your network infrastructure, such as production, staging, and development. Such a setup makes it easy for you and your team to access multiple, independent Soda Cloud organizations using the same profile, or login credentials.

Note that Soda Cloud associates any API keys that you generate within an organization with both your profile and the organization in which you generated the keys. API keys are not interchangeable between organizations.

Contact support@soda.io to request multiple organizations for Soda Cloud.

Access an audit trail

To meet your organization’s regulatory and policy mandates, you can download a CSV file that contains an audit trail of activity on your Soda Cloud account for a date range you specify. The file contains details of each member’s actions, their email and IP addresses, and a timestamp of the action. An Admin is the only role that can access an audit trail for a Soda Cloud account.

1. As an Admin, login to your Soda Cloud account and navigate to your avatar > Organization Settings. Only Admins can view Organization Settings.
2. Access the Audit Trail tab, then set the date range of usage details you wish to examine and click Download.

Alternatively, you can use the Audit Trail endpoint in Soda Cloud’s Reporting API to access audit trail data.

Access to resources

Where the roles and rights described above apply to your organization’s Soda Account, the roles and rights described in the table below apply to the following resources in your account:

• incidents
• checks
• agreements
• datasets
• data sources
• scan definitions
• agents

The roles that define who can make changes to resources in Soda Cloud are Manager, Editor, and Viewer.

The following table outlines the rights of each role associated with each resource. Note that because of its universal access to all things in your Soda Cloud account, an Admin member as described above has all the rights of a Manager relative to resources. Learn more about Soda architecture in general.

Default roles for datasets and checks

When a new member accepts an invitation to join an existing organization, Soda Cloud applies the following defaults to the new member:

• the role of User in the organization
• membership in the Everyone group

By default, all members are included in the group identity called Everyone In the context of an individual dataset, Admins and Managers can use the Everyone group when setting Responsibilities in a dataset. In this early implementation of roles and groups, Everyone is the only group that exists in Soda Cloud. It is not possible to add or remove members from the group, or to create new groups, yet.

For example...

For the Customers_EU dataset, Alice the Admin added the Everyone group to the dataset and assigned the group Editor privileges.

When Bob joins his organization's Soda Cloud account as a User member, Soda Cloud automatically adds his name to the organization's Everyone group. Thus, Bob automatically has Editor level access to the Customers_EU dataset.

By default, when a dataset’s Admin or Manager grants another member or the Everyone group access to a dataset, Soda Cloud automatically assigns the new member or group the default role of Editor for the dataset. You can adjust this setting to a different default role; see Change the default access to datasets.

For example...

When Alice the Admin adds Carlos, a member of her Soda Cloud account, to the Customers_US dataset, Soda Cloud automatically assigns him the role of Editor for that dataset.

By default, when any member adds a new dataset to the Soda Cloud account via Soda Library, Soda Cloud does not assign the Everyone group to the dataset. You can adjust this setting to automatically assign the Everyone group to each newly added dataset; see Change the default access to datasets.

Change the default access to datasets

As an Admin you have the option of adjusting three default access settings:

• By default, when a dataset’s Admin or Manager grants another member or the Everyone group access to a dataset, Soda Cloud automatically assigns the new member or group the default role of Editor for the dataset. You can adjust this setting to a different default role.
• By default, when any member adds a new dataset to the Soda Cloud account via Soda Library, Soda Cloud does not assign the Everyone group to the dataset. You can adjust this setting to automatically assign the Everyone group to each newly added dataset.
• By default, Soda Cloud does not allow dataset owners to manage the responsibilites on the datasets they own. You can adjust this setting to automatically assign the role of Manager to all dataset owners, rather than Editor.

1. As an Admin, login to your Soda Cloud account and navigate to your avatar > Organization Settings. Only Admins can view Organization Settings.
2. Access the Responsibilities tab to adjust either of the two default settings:
   • Use the dropdown to adjust the default role of new members and groups who are granted access to a dataset.
   • Check the box for Soda Cloud to automatically assign the Everyone group to every new dataset that an Admin adds to the Soda Cloud account.
   • Check the box for Soda Cloud to allow all dataset owners to manage the responsibilities for datasets they own.

Note that by default, Soda Cloud automatically adds all new members to the organization’s Everyone group. See Default roles and group.

Example of changed default settings

1. As an Admin, I individually edit the Responsibilities of Datasets A, B, and C and add the Everyone group as Editor to each.
2. Then I access Organization Settings > Responsibilities and change the value of Default role when assigning a new user or group to a resource to Viewer and leave the check box unchecked for Automatically assign the "Everyone" group to the new resource.
3. Then, using Soda Library, I connect to a new data source, and upload 20 new datasets to Soda Cloud.
4. Back in Soda Cloud, I see all the new datasets, and Soda Cloud automatically made me the Dataset Owner of all of them, which comes with the role of Manager. None of the new datasets have any other members that can access them at present, except Admins who can access everything.
5. Next, I edit the Responsibilities of new Datasets D, E, and F and add the Everyone group to those datasets and, because of my setting in Step 2, that group now has Viewer access to these three datasets.
6. Datasets A, B, and C still have the Everyone group assigned to them, but those “Everyone” groups still have Editor access to these specific datasets.

In other words, you cannot globally change the role for the Everyone group across resources. You can only change the role of Everyone by:
a) changing it individually on an individual dataset or check.
b) changing its default role in the Organization Settings which only applies when the Everyone group is added to a dataset or check on upload or creation.

Change access to a dataset

When any member uses Soda Library to add a new dataset to the Soda Cloud account, the member automatically becomes the Dataset Owner. The new dataset can only be accessed by an Admin and the Dataset Owner, who automatically becomes a Manager of the dataset, until the Admin or Dataset Owner changes access to the dataset to grant other members access.

As an Admin or a Manager of a dataset, you can access the Responsibilities tab for an individual dataset to make changes to the default role assignments in the dataset. All members, regardless of their role assignment, can view the Responsibilities tab for a dataset.

1. As an Admin or Manager, login to your Soda Cloud account and navigate to the Datasets dashboard.
2. Click the stacked dots to the right of the dataset for which you wish to adjust the role assignments, then select Edit Dataset.
3. In the Responsibilities tab, use the search bar to find specific members to which you wish to assign a role other than the default, Editor, then use the dropdown next to each name to adjust their role.
   Alternatively, search for the group everyone and change the role of the group.

Review member licenses

Some Soda Cloud licensing models include a specific number of Author licenses for members of the Soda Cloud account. A member’s license status controls whether they can make changes to any datasets, checks, and agreements in the Soda Cloud account.

• Authors essentially have read-write access to Soda Cloud resources and maintain the role of Admin, Manager, or Editor.
• Viewers essentially have read-only acecss to Soda Cloud resources and maintain the role of Viewer.

1. To review the licenses that your members have, as an Admin, login to your Soda Cloud account and navigate to your avatar > Organization Settings. Only Soda Cloud Admin members can view Organization Settings.
2. Access the Members tab to view a list of people who have access to your Soda Cloud account, the role they have in the organization (Admin or User), and their License status (Author or Viewer).
3. Click a member’s Author or Viewer label in the License column to access a Responsibilities window that lists the member’s access to resources (datasets, agreements, and checks), the role they hold for each resource, and their license status relative to the resource.

Data source, dataset, agreement, and check owners

There are four ownership roles in Soda Cloud that identify the member that owns a data source, a dataset, an agreement, or a check. These ownership roles do not enforce any rights or permissions on these resources, they are simply identifiers.

• By default, the member who added the data source becomes the Data Source Owner and Dataset Owner of all datasets in that data source. The default role that Soda Cloud assigns to the Dataset Owner is that of Manager.
• By default, the member who creates an agreement becomes the Check Owner of all checks defined in the agreement.
• By default, the member who creates a no-code check becomes its Check Owner.
• By default, all Owners use an Author license.
• You cannot change the Agreement Owner.
  
  

Change the Data Source Owner

1. If you are the Admin of the organization, login to your Soda Cloud account and navigate to your avatar > Data Sources.
2. In the Data Sources tab, click the stacked dots to the right of the data source for which you wish to adjust the ownership, then select Edit Datasource.
3. In the Assign Owner tab, use the dropdown to select the name of another member to take ownership of the data source, then Save.

Change the Dataset Owner

1. If you are the Admin of the organization, or have a Manager role for the dataset, login to your Soda Cloud account and navigate to the Datasets dashboard.
2. Click the stacked dots to the right of the dataset for which you wish to adjust the ownership, then select Edit Dataset.
3. In the Attributes tab, use the dropdown to select the name of another member to take ownership of the dataset, then Save.
4. Soda Cloud automatically assigns the role of Manager to the new Dataset Owner.

To bulk-change the owner of all new datasets added to a data source, follow the steps to Change the Data Source Owner and, in step 3, use the dropdown to change the owner of all the datsets in the data source.

Change the Check Owner

1. If you are the Admin of the organization, or have a Manager or Editor role for the check’s dataset, login to your Soda Cloud account and navigate to the Checks dashboard.
2. Click the stacked dots to the right of the check for which you wish to adjust the ownership, then select Edit Check.
3. In the Attributes tab, use the dropdown to select the name of another member to take ownership of the check, then Save.

Go further

• Need help? Join the Soda community on Slack.
• Learn more about Soda architecture.
• Organize your datasets to facilitate your search for the right data.
• Invite colleagues to join your organization’s Soda Cloud account.
• Learn more about creating and tracking Soda Incidents.
  

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Documentation always applies to the latest version of Soda products
Last modified on 26-Apr-24

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