An approach is provided for managing the provisioning and sharing of data among common users of a data service. A provisioning platform associates a security certificate with a business unit based on the submission of a provisioning request. The provisioning platform also associating one or more keys for accessing the data from the data service with a data container of the data service, the business unit, a key manager associated with the business unit, or a combination thereof based on the generation of a policy for establishing the identity of the business unit, for controlling access to data associated with the business unit as maintained by a data service, or a combination thereof based on the security certificate.