Enterprise Vault Access Management

Enterprise banks evaluating secure document exchange platforms face a deceptively simple question:

Should we create a vault (or drawer) for every client upfront?

A widely adopted best practice among mature institutions is to:

Provision vaults and drawers just-in-time, and focus architectural effort on entitlement governance and access control.

Vault creation is easy. Entitlement design is hard.

In this post, we’ll explore:

• Why banks avoid pre-provisioning client vaults

• How drawers become entitlement boundaries across business lines

• The access control patterns that succeed in production

Vault Provisioning Isn’t the Hard Part

Platforms like SideDrawer provide a clear hierarchical container model for structuring client information:

• Client Filing Cabinet – the conceptual root of the client’s secure document space

• Tenant / Line of Business Context – wealth, insurance, commercial, etc.

• Drawer – a governed workspace scoped to a business line or relationship type

• Tile / Record Type – structured categories such as Statements, Tax, Lending

• Record (Folder) – a specific workflow artifact (e.g., “John’s RRSP Q4 2022”)

• Files + Metadata + Collaborators – the operational access boundary

The diagram below illustrates this structure clearly:

From an API and orchestration perspective, provisioning these components is operationally straightforward:

• Create or reuse the client container

• Create an appropriate line-of-business drawer

• Attach collaborators based on policy

• Trigger downstream workflows (forms, reminders, routing)

Technically, this can happen in seconds. But enterprise banks do not optimize for speed. 

They optimize for:

• Regulatory scope

• Operational burden

• Entitlement risk

• Audit exposure

This is why leading institutions avoid pre-provisioning containers for all clients and instead adopt just-in-time provisioning triggered by governed workflows.

How Just-in-Time Vault Provisioning Works in Practice

Enterprise banks do not create vaults simply because a client record exists in a CRM. They create them when a specific workflow, in a specific business line, requires a controlled environment for document exchange.

Common triggers include:

The key principle is consistent:

Vaults and drawers are created only when a regulated workflow justifies their existence — not because a party record exists elsewhere.

This reduces unused containers and ensures entitlements emerge only when business context requires them.

Client Vaults Are Entitlement Boundaries, Not File Repositories

For large institutions, a client vault is not simply storage. It is the entitlement boundary spanning the client’s engagements across multiple business lines.

A typical high-net-worth client vault may have drawers such as:

Wealth Advisory · Direct Investing · Private Banking · Insurance · Trust & Estate

One Vault With Three Different Perspectives

This model enables:

• Clear segregation by business line

• Need-to-know access enforcement

• Controlled collaboration without cross-LOB leakage

Entitlement Governance Patterns at Enterprise Scale

Across institutions, several architecture patterns emerge consistently.

All while preserving:

• Documents

• Audit history

• Traceability between source and surviving containers

Why Governance Matters More Than the Share Button

Enterprise buyers are not primarily concerned with UI-level convenience features.

They are concerned with:

• Preventing cross-LOB leakage

• Meeting regulatory obligations across repositories

• Supporting audit cycles (who had access, when, and why)

• Automated access revocation tied to workflow state

• Avoiding privilege creep over time

The challenge is architecting entitlements so that provisioning is deterministic, governed, and audit-ready.

The Enterprise-Grade Pattern

The strongest deployments converge on a consistent model:

• Just-in-time vault and drawer creation

• One client container, one drawer per line of business

• Role- and LOB-mapped access encoded in IAM and orchestration

• Segmentation controls enforced in both UI and API

• Lifecycle ownership aligned to retention and deactivation policies

• Full auditability of provisioning, overrides, and entitlement changes

Final Thought: Technology Enables, Governance Determines Success

Platforms like SideDrawer provide the structural elements:

• Client containers

• LOB-specific drawers

• Role-based collaboration

• APIs for real-time provisioning

• Integrations with CRM, IAM, and enterprise content systems

But at enterprise scale, success depends far more on entitlement governance:

Design the entitlement model per line of business, codify it across systems, and let just-in-time provisioning follow from those rules.

That is where the real enterprise complexity lives and where the most meaningful value is delivered.