Nowadays security issues are a prime concern because most identity methods are not so effective. The more technology is improving, the more new threats are coming and IAM is needed to significantly mitigate them. Due to the amount of information which is stored, used and transmitted, companies must define certain restrictions regarding who is allowed to access data. Providing a secure access is a serious challenge to IT professionals who must simultaneously meet the needs of different users across numerous, disparate applications.
Meeting these demands across a variety of on-premises and cloud applications requires the use of agile identity and access management solutions. Effective IAM solutions help enterprises provide secure and efficient access to technology resources across diverse systems. They also deliver a number of significant benefits which is a good reason to implement Identity and Access Management Solution in your business.
Identity and access management (IAM) helps you securely control who has access to your systems, applications, and data within your organization, as well as where they can go within those systems.
With proper IAM solutions in place, organizations will be able to define who has what level of access. This shrinks the attack surface and prevents data leaks because user privileges are closely moderated.
What Is IAM?
Identity and access management encompasses a lot, but at its core IAM is about identity. IAM is set of policies, procedures, and protocols used to secure access to computing resources. Its primary purposes are security, compliance, and business continuity.
IAM is set of policies, procedures, and protocols used to secure access to computing resources.
The identity part of IAM is the methods by which an organization can verify that an individual is who they say they are. The access part of IAM refers to the process of determining how each individual should be allowed to access specific information, hardware, or software tools within an organization’s infrastructure.
The purpose of IAM is to provide access control to IT resources by managing user accounts, devices, applications, files, services, systems, and networks. In doing so, an organization can ensure that all business data is secure. IT can also create data policies that prevent data loss or theft.
Components of Identity and Access Management
But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s break down exactly what identity and access management entails. There are four basic components:
User provisioning
Privileged Access Management (PAM)
Account security
Integration
An enterprise should have at least three to five goals when choosing an IAM solution — and again, these will depend on your unique needs. A good way to tell if your system is outmoded or inefficient is by monitoring login success rates. Ideally, your success rate should be above 95%. If it’s hovering around 75% or less, then something is wrong!
Main Benefits of Identity and Access Management
Improved security
IAM solutions help identify and mitigate security risks. You can use IAM to identify policy violations or remove inappropriate access privileges, without having to search through multiple distributed systems. You can also leverage IAM to ensure that security measures are in place to meet regulatory and audit requirements.
Information sharing
IAM provides a common platform for access and identity management information. You can apply the same security policies across all the operating platforms and devices used by the organization. IAM frameworks can help you enforce policies related to user authentication, privileges, and validation, and attend to “privilege creep”.
Ease of use
IAM simplifies signup, sign-in and user management processes for application owners, end-users and system administrators. IAM makes it simple to provide and manage access, and this promotes user satisfaction.
Productivity gains
IAM centralizes and automates the identity and access management lifecycle, creating automated workflows for scenarios like a new hire or a role transition. This can improve processing time for access and identity changes and reduce errors.
Reduced IT Costs
IAM services can lower operating costs. Using federated identity services means you no longer need local identities for external uses; this makes application administration easier. Cloud-based IAM services can reduce the need to buy and maintain on-premise infrastructure.
Compliance managagement
AM systems are instrumental in compliance efforts. It can provide many of the safety controls required by security standards and can demonstrate to auditors that corporate information is appropriately controlled.
Identity access and management are useful in many ways: it ensures regulatory compliance, enables cost savings, and simplifies the lives of your customers by enhancing their experience.
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In today’s world of enterprise IT, there are many factors that a company must consider in order to decide whether a cloud infrastructure is the right fit. Conversely, there are many companies that are unable make the leap into the cloud, instead relying on their tried-and-true legacy and on-premise applications and software to do business.
Which path is the correct one for your enterprise depends entirely on your needs and what it is you’re looking for in a solution.
Deployment
On Premises: In an on-premises environment, resources are deployed in-house and within an enterprise’s IT infrastructure. An enterprise is responsible for maintaining the solution and all its related processes.
Cloud: While there are different forms of cloud computing (such as public cloud, private cloud, and a hybrid cloud), in a public cloud computing environment, resources are hosted on the premises of the service provider but enterprises are able to access those resources and use as much as they want at any given time.
Cost
On Premises: For enterprises that deploy software on premise, they are responsible for the ongoing costs of the server hardware, power consumption, and space.
Cloud: Enterprises that elect to use a cloud computing model only need to pay for the resources that they use, with none of the maintenance and upkeep costs, and the price adjusts up or down depending on how much is consumed.
Control
On Premises: In an on-premises environment, enterprises retain all their data and are fully in control of what happens to it, for better or worse. Companies in highly regulated industries with extra privacy concerns are more likely to hesitate to leap into the cloud before others because of this reason.
Cloud: In a cloud computing environment, the question of ownership of data is one that many companies – and vendors for that matter, have struggled with. Data and encryption keys reside within your third-party provider, so if the unexpected happens and there is downtime, you maybe be unable to access that data.
Security
On Premises: Companies that have extra sensitive information, such as government and banking industries must have a certain level of security and privacy that an on-premises environment provides. Despite the promise of the cloud, security is the primary concern for many industries, so an on-premises environment, despite some of its drawbacks and price tag, make more sense.
Cloud: Security concerns remain the number one barrier to cloud computing deployment. There have been many publicized cloud breaches, and IT departments around the world are concerned. From personal information of employees such as login credentials to a loss of intellectual property, the security threats are real.
Compliance
On Premises: Many companies these days operate under some form of regulatory control, regardless of the industry. Perhaps the most common one is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) for private health information, but there are many others, including the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which contains detailed student records, and other government and industry regulations. For companies that are subject to such regulations, it is imperative that they remain compliant and know where their data is at all times.
Cloud: Enterprises that do choose a cloud computing model must do their due diligence and ensure that their third-party provider is up to code and in fact compliant with all of the different regulatory mandates within their industry. Sensitive data must be secured, and customers, partners, and employees must have their privacy ensured.
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Converged IAM (Identity and Access Management) unifies disparate physical and logical access control systems to create a singular trusted identity and credential to match rights and access them across the enterprise. Converged IAM can’t exist without network connections between these logical and physical identity systems.
Soffid unifies processes, policies and procedures across enterprise access systems, enabling comprehensive governance and simplified compliance. The platform provides centralized and converged identity and access governance that extends across physical, logical and operational access environments. The solution provides preventive risk analysis and active policy enforcement in addition to converged risk and identity analytics, including unified user access view.
The corporate world experienced a significant uptick in physical and cybersecurity threats due to the pandemic sending millions of employees home to work. Nevertheless, technology available today makes linking the physical and cybersecurity realms easier than it ever has been before, and the changing role of today’s CISO provides a more comprehensive view of keeping all forms of security cohesive, and up to date.
CISOs and their supporting departments struggle with providing the right people with the appropriate level of access to the right technology . The process of managing the level of provisioning for identity and credential management for all employees that join, leave, or move within the organization is already a high-volume task. Additionally, the expansion of the gig economy has forced corporations to have to factor in additional users that need access to corporate data, tools, content, and access to physical spaces from third parties and contractors, only adding to the overall risk for the organization.
Due to the level of detail that is required to ensure accurate provisions, mistakes are bound to happen. Unfortunately, the mistake that happens most often is leaving users over-entitled due to access that has mounted over time (physical or virtual) for tasks that then never get removed.
Managing that amount of change requires technology to support the process. Identity and access management tools have been heavily invested in by organizations to create central control over access to their virtual networks, applications, and data such as Soffid. These solutions become the gateway to propagate identities and the correct level of control across the entire environment. These systems are also usually automatically connected to HR solutions to ensure up-to-date and authoritative information is being utilized and is connected to the rest of the organization. Having a link to employee directories allows technology to rapidly identify authorized users and de-provision users to remove facility access quickly and easily.
Forward-thinking CISOs and CSOs are now looking more broadly at security and how to not only mitigate risk but also how they can make their departments more efficient. These leaders are looking at how they connect the IAM solution to other parts of the organization such as physical access control as a more centralized process as well as ensuring that there is a single record of truth on individual access. These CISOs expect access control solutions to integrate their IAM solutions with their physical credentialing and access control. Ultimately, by doing this, their teams save time and effort, by utilizing a single source of truth for access (physical and virtual), automatically eliminating access upon offboarding.
From a data and risk management perspective, with these systems connected, CISOs and threat analysts in the Security Operations Center (SOC) have more data and visibility as they investigate threats and understand the level of risk or exposure from a cyber and physical event.
The IAM industry today needs a solution that can provide holistic solutions with a proactive approach to security – Converged IAM enables this possibility, bringing together Access Management, Identity Governance and Administration, and Privileged Access Management in single platform. This improves the cybersecurity landscape by leaps and bounds, making IAM easily accessible for organizations of all market sizes while decreasing budget overruns that come with acquiring multiple separate IAM solutions. It also makes vendor management easy, reduces the long bills, makes IAM more user-friendly which increases user adoption, drastically increases ROI, thus retaining stakeholder interest.
We’d love to hear from you. See how Soffid can help you stay ahead of the curve in a rapidly evolving digital world. Get Started!
References:
(1) EC-Council Global Services
(2) Security Infowatch
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Bitsoft Team S.A. is a company specialized in technological solutions, with the following objectives:
Protect the most important asset of organizations (their data) through information security tools and good practices.
Improve the experience of internal and external users of organizations, through the development and implementation of innovative technological solutions based on artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality and other solutions with innovative components.
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