Rights management describes data ownership and rights and relies heavily on security functions to control data privileges to ensure privacy and to protect data from unauthorized manipulation. Data owners and managers maintain stewardship of the data under their purview. They can grant or revoke certain rights to all data or defined sets or subsets of raw data, aggregated data, or consolidated data.

Rights management is key to meeting regulatory and compliance requirements and to keep track of ownership when data-related functions are outsourced to cloud providers or other third parties. Rights can be associated with APIs for granting authority and accessing a device.

A graph database can be useful to manage the relationships between devices, users, location, networks, and permissions. Blockchain might provide a scalable mechanism for verifying and sharing access to data and assets in the IIoT system (see Chapter 11, A Vision of the Future).