2020 was quite the turning point for Cybersecurity. The global pandemic resulted in the shift of work as most organizations started to work in a remote environment. It gave rise to security concerns and made things much more difficult for IT experts and businesses.
Since the Covid-19 spread, the US FBI reported a 300% increase in the total number of cybercrimes. There are various events in 2020 where identity theft was common, and even the larger organizations couldn’t save themselves. One example is the CouchSurfing Company, a global hospitality company. The company’s data was put for sale on the dark web containing the personal data of more than 17 million users who use their free online lodging service. The sensitive data comprises users’ names, IDs, email addresses, and CouchSurfing account settings.
All this gives rise to the importance of identity and access management. By adopting the best practices for IAM, your business can enhance security and ensure that this year doesn’t bring the same challenges as the last. To make things easier for you, we’ve prepared this blog about the best IAM practices in 2021. Before we get into the main topic, let’s first discuss IAM in brief for anyone new to the subject.
What Is Identity and Access Management?
Identity and access management is a practice of defining and managing user identities and access permission. It manages user identities and regulates their access in an organization. Under this, businesses set individuals’ roles and responsibilities within a network framework.
By incorporating IAM policies, businesses boost their customer experience. It is yet another way which gives them success in the market. It includes combining compliance with the company’s policy and enabling security tools like:
- Multi-factor authentication
- Establishing single sign-on
- Enforcing zero-trust policy
- Stakeholder awareness
If we compare the past, the identity and access management market is critical and will flourish in the upcoming time. According to research, the IAM market will rise from $10 billion in 2019 to more than $20 billion by 2024.
Five Best IAM Practices
The identity access management solutions come with both authorization and authentication services. It also deploys an access policy for the customers and employees all across the digital landscape.
Below are the five best IAM practices in 2021.
DevOps Tools
A data breach occurs when there are some loopholes In the applications, and you fail to report to the IT department. The malicious agents take full advantage of such loopholes and make the business experience a data breach. The breaching incident causes a major monetary loss but the business also loses its customers’ brand and reputation in the market.
Usually, enterprises don’t maintain a record of unstructured data that includes credit card and social security numbers. It is relatively easy for cyber-crooks to access it and result in a data breach. Use various DevOps tools to keep track of unstructured data. When you record the unstructured data from the developing stage, this boosts up your security level.
Having Experienced Resources
The rapid technological change has brought significant challenges for businesses. The introduction of new technologies and IAM tools creates resource constraint issues for the IT industry, small and large. Having knowledgeable and certified resources to manage the IAM is a must for security. Businesses need IAM consultants to resolve these challenges and develop a permanent solution. The security needs are increasing beyond the IT resources and thus the demand of the consultants.
Having an external consultant to augment the staff or outsourcing the IAM management to managed services platform can provide much in-depth assistance. These consultants can offer solutions by undergoing a series of events. It includes:
- Analyzing the potential risks
- Conducting research
- Managing day to day operations
- Perform audits and assessments
- Detects the threats
- Choose the appropriate time to perform upgrades.
- Validate appropriate access control
Resource augmentation may make perfect use of external talent to compliment your internal resources to address the business needs.
Integration with Privileged Access Management
Privileged Access Management (PAM) is another best practice for IAM. Being a privileged user means that you have all the administrative credentials of a system. You have the complete authority to set up, alter, and even delete any existing account. PAM within your business means minimizing the attack surface, upcoming potential threats, and insider threats that everybody neglects.
By integrating PAM with IAM, the IT stakeholders get better knowledge, control, and customer and employee accounts. This practice helps you in controlling the increasing breaching incidents. It’s found that 70% of the breaching events occur because of the misuse of privileged accounts. The IAM solution allows the organization to control the user access rights. At the same time, the PAM solution gives control over-privileged users. They both manage administrative rights and protect against severe cyber-crimes and threats.
In conversation with our clients, insider threat has been a growing concern for many organizations. Enabling PAM in integration with the IAM reduces the risk manifold.
Gateway for Cloud Providers
Many small and large businesses have embraced cloud services to reduce costs and enhance security. Shifting business-sensitive data on the cloud provides an effective way to protect from the increasing cyber-threats. However, cloud services have a shared responsivity model, which means how you protect data on the cloud is customers’ responsibility. Now several cloud providers offer IAM services to help fulfill your responsibilities. You can use these cloud provider services and further limit any third-party from accessing your sensitive data by implementing the proper controls.
When you use such cloud services, you have one central location where you manage the identities of the cloud administrators of your enterprise. Using the cloud provider service as IAM practice, you would spend less money on the organization’s security. Also, enterprise security depends on a trusted centralized model, and the users can access it from any device regardless of their location by utilizing Single Sign-On technology. Cloud services can be a safe and secure option to use and minimize the cyber-risk.
Artificial Intelligence
Cyber-crooks are getting more sophisticated than ever before. They are adopting new tactics to approach and infiltrate any organizational network. They have become so smart that even the security teams are sometimes unable to detect them. In such circumstances, business corporations are turning towards Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies. The AI technology helps in improving security access and better maintains user integrity.
When you use AI technology like Robotic Process Automation (RPA), it monitors and reveals the abnormalities found in user behavior. There is an enormous amount of data, but the ML-based system handles it efficiently. It scans the data faster than any other system capable of preventing network breach and data loss. Systems analyze the behavior changes even if the hacker gains access to the system by any backdoor. It sends an alert to the IT department, so they become cautious about the rising threat. For immediate results, the AI system denies access requests and protects your business data and integrity if configured correctly.
Bottom Line
Implementing these IAM’s best practices is crucial for maintaining a resilient, cybersecure environment. Businesses must know who can access sensitive data under different situations and circumstances. Allowing everyone to access sensitive data can bring dreadful consequences to you and your business. IAM services can provide significant benefits to protect sensitive data and access to it.
A well-defined enterprise IAM platform provides the right access, to the right resources, at the right time.
Furthermore, it is also vital that you have a thorough overview of your organization’s IT infrastructure. It helps you to understand better where to start and your loopholes. Follow the IAM mentioned above best practices and strengthen your business integrity.
If you would like to learn more information on being more cybersecure, reach out to our qualified sales associates if you would like assistance in any of these areas. Your security is our priority here at Siaraa, so we’re ready to tackle and resolve any of your security related concerns!
