by Rebeca | Apr 9, 2024 | Release, soffid
In the dynamic landscape of academic environments, where access to resources and data security are paramount, Soffid IAM for Education emerges as a groundbreaking solution tailored to meet the unique challenges faced by educational institutions. With a keen understanding of the specific needs within academic settings, Soffid IAM for Education is designed to optimize governance, ensure seamless access to critical resources, meet compliance standards, and enhance overall security. This solution offers a multitude of highlights and benefits, making it an indispensable tool for universities looking to modernize their identity and access management systems.
Account for Life: A Lifelong Academic Companion
One of the most notable features of Soffid IAM for Education is the “Account for Life” service. This innovative offering is crafted to support the alumni student body at an exceptionally reasonable cost, ensuring that the relationship between the institution and its alumni remains strong and secure long after graduation. It embodies a commitment to providing lifelong value, extending beyond the traditional boundaries of academic enrollment.
Pre-bundled Package: Tailored for Excellence
Soffid IAM for Education introduces a pre-bundled package meticulously customized for educational institutions. This package includes:
- Password Manager: Safeguards every credential, ensuring secure storage for both internal education institution applications and users’ external credentials. By extending protection for users’ external credentials, institutions enhance the value proposition for their alumni.
- Access Manager: Offers Two-Factor Authentication, Single Sign-On, a Self-Service Portal, and more, simplifying and securing access to necessary resources.
- Identity Governance and Administration: Provides comprehensive management of all identities within the institution, from employees and students to external partners and alumni.
Comprehensive Coverage of All Identities
Understanding the diverse ecosystem within academic institutions, Soffid IAM for Education covers a broad spectrum of identities, including internal identities (employees, staff, students), upstream identities (providers, logistic chains, outsourced services), and downstream identities (alumni, guest professors). This holistic approach ensures that every individual connected to the institution is accounted for and securely managed.
Multilingual Front Ends: Bridging Languages and Cultures
In recognition of the global nature of modern education, Soffid IAM for Education offers multilingual front ends, currently available in several languages, including Spanish, English, French, Arabic, and more. This feature is particularly beneficial for universities with international students, ensuring ease of use and facilitating a seamless user experience. Additionally, Soffid can integrate any other language within weeks upon request, underscoring its commitment to adaptability and inclusiveness.
Beyond the Classroom: Ensuring Security, Compliance, and Efficiency
Soffid IAM for Education goes beyond traditional identity management by offering effective user management, ensuring regulatory compliance, automating processes, and enhancing security measures. From simplifying onboarding and offboarding to mitigating the risk of unauthorized access and reinforcing security measures, Soffid IAM for Education minimizes the risk of data breaches and streamlines operations, making it an essential solution for the ever-evolving demands of academic institutions.
Lifetime Access to Resources: A Promise of Continuity
One of the most forward-thinking aspects of Soffid IAM for Education is the provision of lifetime accounts for users. This feature equips users with a unique set of credentials for their entire academic journey and potentially their professional career, adapting to their evolution with the university. It ensures continuity and a consistent user experience throughout the academic lifecycle, averting confusion and guaranteeing access to digital resources even post-graduation.
In the quest for a secure, compliant, and efficient academic environment, Soffid IAM for Education stands out as a comprehensive solution that addresses the multifaceted challenges faced by educational institutions today. By empowering universities with the tools needed to manage identities effectively, Soffid IAM for Education is setting new standards in academic governance and security.
Discover more about how Soffid IAM for Education can transform your institution’s approach to identity and access management by contacting us at contact@soffid.com or +34 871 962 912.
by Rebeca | Apr 3, 2024 | soffid
by Rebeca | Mar 25, 2024 | soffid, trends
The shift towards cloud services is a discernible trend among today’s organizations, driven by the undeniable benefits of cost savings, improved availability, and enhanced flexibility. The transition to cloud computing promises a significant reduction in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and offers an agility that traditional on-premise solutions struggle to match. However, this increasing reliance on cloud providers introduces a risk often underestimated by many: the management of authentication credentials.
The Growing Challenge of Password Management
As organizations utilize a broader array of cloud services, the proliferation of passwords, One-Time Password (OTP) devices, and tokens begins to exceed the management capabilities of IT staff. This complexity harbors several risks worth noting:
- Password Overload: The practice of using unique passwords for each system, while secure in theory, leads to two significant issues. Users often resort to reusing passwords across platforms, posing a security risk if one provider’s database is compromised. Moreover, each additional cloud service increases the vulnerability to attacks, including phishing and exploits targeting specific cloud platforms.
- Browser-based Password Managers: While convenient, password managers integrated into web browsers double the risk. They become prime targets for traditional cyber threats, such as trojan horse attacks, due to their extensive attack surface.
Towards a Password-less Future
The consensus among cybersecurity experts is clear: the future lies in moving beyond passwords as the sole method of authentication. However, this transition introduces its own challenges, notably the proliferation of authentication tokens, which merely substitutes one problem for another.
To address this, the creation of an enterprise identity service is imperative. Such a service would facilitate user authentication across various applications and protocols, not limited to modern standards like SAML and OAuth but also encompassing legacy systems.
Hard Authentication Tokens and Behavioral Analysis
Implementing hard authentication tokens is a pivotal next step. Solutions like the Soffid Push Authenticator offer a secure and user-friendly option, though the specific needs of an organization may necessitate alternative methods, such as SMS, email, or TOTP tokens. The flexibility to adapt authentication methods to different scenarios is crucial.
Moreover, integrating network intelligence and behavior analysis enhances security by reducing the interaction required from the user, thereby minimizing the attack surface accessible to hackers.
The Benefits of Comprehensive Identity Providers
The deployment of enterprise identity providers yields immediate and tangible benefits:
- Increased Productivity: Simplifying the login process reduces the time spent on password recovery efforts.
- Enhanced Security: Cloud providers will not have access to user passwords, and the risk of phishing significantly decreases.
- Improved User Satisfaction: Employees benefit from a more streamlined and secure access management system.
In conclusion, as organizations continue to embrace cloud services, the need for robust, flexible, and secure identity and access management solutions becomes ever more critical. By adopting advanced authentication technologies and practices, companies can protect their digital assets while ensuring a seamless and productive user experience. Soffid is at the forefront of this transformation, providing the tools and expertise needed to navigate the complexities of identity management in the cloud era.
by Rebeca | Mar 19, 2024 | soffid, trends
In the modern enterprise, the adoption of DevOps practices is more than a mere trend; it’s an evolution in how organizations approach software development and IT operations. This innovative methodology has proven to unify teams and processes, offering substantial benefits across the board. However, integrating development and IT operations presents unique challenges, particularly in the realm of security.
Historically, friction between IT operation teams and development teams has been commonplace, primarily due to differing security cultures. DevOps aims to eliminate this friction by harmonizing practices and goals. Yet, it’s important to recognize that while DevOps can reduce visible conflicts, it doesn’t inherently solve underlying security issues—often, these issues are merely obscured until they surface as significant problems.
One area where this disparity becomes evident is in the utilization of Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions. IT operation departments have traditionally employed PAM to some extent, safeguarding access to critical assets like operating systems, network devices, and databases. Conversely, development departments have lagged in PAM adoption. The reason is straightforward: PAM solutions were originally conceived with IT operations in mind, rendering them less applicable or flexible enough for the development lifecycle.
DevOps, however, introduces its own set of critical assets, notably containers and secrets, which necessitate a new approach to privileged access. The DevOps workflow allows developers to use familiar tools for container configuration, yet access to production containers for troubleshooting or updates poses a significant security risk.
To mitigate these risks, leading-edge PAM solutions offer mechanisms for safe container access, such as shell-like sessions that are fully recorded, with every keystroke and file transfer monitored. This capability enables the detection of risky behavior or unauthorized actions, thus maintaining the integrity of the production environment.
Moreover, the management of secrets—such as database passwords—requires a PAM solution capable of securely updating credentials in real-time, often within Kubernetes secrets, to ensure both security and operational continuity.
At Soffid, our expertise in navigating these complexities is unparalleled. With both PAM and Identity and Access Management (IAM) engines integrated into our Converged Identity Platform, we are uniquely positioned to address the specific needs of DevOps environments. Our solution not only accommodates the dynamic nature of microcontainer-based operations but does so without sacrificing the agility and security that are critical to DevOps success.
In essence, the journey towards integrating DevOps into an organization’s DNA is fraught with potential security pitfalls. However, with Soffid’s innovative approach to PAM and IAM, organizations can embrace DevOps with confidence, ensuring that their development and operational practices are secure, efficient, and, above all, unified.
by Rebeca | Mar 12, 2024 | soffid, trends
Customer Identity Management is increasingly gaining more relevance. The complexity of identification and authentication protocols is rising due to different factors, with the most relevant being:
Some standards are very new or still in a draft version. For instance, the OpenID logout protocol specification was approved only 16 months ago.
Legacy protocols are hard to implement. In fact, the NSA has encouraged all organizations not to attempt to implement SAML by themselves, as a poor implementation can lead to multiple security vulnerabilities.
Security vulnerabilities have a dramatic impact on organizations. In our case, a security bug in a CIAM authentication module can lead to high levels of fraud, putting the whole organization at risk.
On the other hand, despite having a secure environment being a must, it can be a barrier to enrolling new customers. The process to identify and harden user identification should be progressive: let the user access anonymously, identify them only when it is really needed. Later, suggest to the end user to enroll in a hard authentication token. The customer must have an easy-to-go path, but at the same time, they must feel comfortable and secure.
However, keep in mind that once the hard authentication token is granted, always asking for it can be annoying, and we don’t want to bother our customers. The solution is to have a smart engine able to assign a risk level to each transaction and ask for the second authentication factor when the risk level is above one threshold. For instance, if the user is connecting from the same origin country, using the same device, we probably will not ask for the second authentication factor, but if they are connecting from a new device from a foreign country, the second authentication factor is really needed.
For any SaaS provider, focusing on these aspects can be cumbersome and prone to errors. That’s the reason why CIAM platforms like Soffid IDaaS are gaining a lot of interest. Using these tools, organizations can focus on the relevant aspects:
- Defining the customer journey
- Defining the authentication levels required at each step
- Configuring the CIAM tool to manage all authentication problems
- Customizing the CIAM tool to look and feel like the organization’s customer platform.
In turn, the CIAM tool takes responsibility for some critical aspects:
- Registering end users
- Allowing the user to reset their passwords
- Enrolling a second authentication factor
- Asking for a second authentication factor when needed.
In conclusion, CIAM is a specialized version of traditional access management platforms, but its challenges and risks are unique. A CIAM project cannot be addressed as a traditional access management project. Additionally, based on our experience at Soffid, the team profile is also different. In access management projects, the main actor is the IT managers’ team, but in CIAM projects, we need to engage the IT team, business team, and also development teams.
