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Delegated Admins

Delegated Admins in Apache Ranger and Privacera enable fine-grained delegation of administrative privileges. Instead of giving full administrative rights to every data steward or team lead, you can delegate policy management for specific resources to selected users or groups.

This helps enforce least privilege principles for administrative tasks while still allowing domain-specific teams to manage their own access control policies.

This capability is controlled at the policy level using the Delegate Admin flag inside each policy item.

Use Cases

  • A team lead who manages access to their own data lake tables
  • A department head responsible for granting access to sensitive PII columns
  • A BI admin who manages masking rules for dashboards in Snowflake or Databricks
  • A data engineer who wants to share resources from their own personal workspace

How It Works

  • Within a policy, the Delegate Admin option allows specified users/groups to manage that policy
  • They can view and edit only the policies where they are explicitly granted this privilege
  • They cannot modify other policies, manage users, or configure system-wide settings unless granted separately

Example: Delegated Admin for Table

Allow SELECT on sales_data.orders to analysts group, and delegate policy management to data_leads group:

Field Value
Groups (Access) analysts
Delegate Admin data_leads
Access Types SELECT
Resource sales_data.orders

Effect:

  • analysts can query the orders table
  • Members of data_leads can update this policy or add new rules under this scope

Scope of Delegated Admin

Since in the above example, the Delegate Admin is given only to SELECT privilege, the data_leads group can only provide SELECT access to other users or groups. This ensures that the delegated admin does not have full control over the resource.

Best Practices

  • Use delegated admins to distribute policy management to appropriate domain owners
  • Grant Delegate Admin only on policies that the user is meant to control
  • Combine with resource scoping (e.g., specific database or bucket) to avoid overreach
  • Audit admin actions to ensure delegated privileges are used appropriately

UI Behavior

  • Delegated Admins will only see and manage policies where they are explicitly marked as delegate
  • In Privacera Portal, delegated admin users get a limited view of the Access Management tab

Difference from Security Zones

While Delegated Admins and Security Zones both aim to decentralize access control, they operate at different layers:

Feature Delegated Admins Security Zones
Scope Per-policy level Service-level, covering resource hierarchies
Configuration Defined inside individual policies Defined in separate zone configuration
Policy Visibility Delegated admin can only manage allowed policies Zone admin can only view and manage policies within their zone
Purpose Targeted delegation to manage specific access rules Logical segmentation of services for distributed governance
Enforcement Access to policy edit rights Access to create/manage policies within a zone

They can also be used together. For example, within a security zone, a specific user can be designated as a delegated admin for certain policies.

Read Security Zones for more information.

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