Are you Efficiently Managing your Network Accesses

If you are not paying attention to cybersecurity, you’re basically leaving the henhouse door open and waiting for the fox have its fun. With the growing proliferation of cyber threats, you may find out just how costly data breaches and malware attacks are. Attacks come from all vectors, including the cloud tools you use every day.

You are probably using apps that you don’t even know are cloud-based. After all, if it does what you need, who cares how? But, according to Zippia, the average employee uses 36 cloud-based services every workday. Managing access to sensitive data and resources has become crucial. It's a vital piece to maintaining robust security. One breached account in a business app can lead to significant consequences.

The theft of login credentials is a good-paying crimes for hackers. They are in high demand on the Dark Web and credentials for some online accounts can be a goldmine. Depending on the size or stature of an organization, an email administrator’s login can command between $500 to $140,000.

So, with all these access credentials floating around, who gets access to what? If you have not addressed access management in your cybersecurity strategy, you could suffer serious financial consequences from the actual costs to the loss of reputation that comes with a data breach.

A severe data breach can add your company to the 60% of companies that go out of business after such a breach – within six months, according to The U.S. National Cyber Security Alliance.

Let’s look at the reasons why access management has become essential to good data security. It plays a pivotal role in safeguarding valuable assets and ensuring data integrity.

Why is identity and access management important?

Protection from Insider Threats

Insider threats can either originate as malicious actions by disgruntled employees, or simply an innocent result of poor (or lack thereof) Security Awareness Training causing unintentional errors. Identity & Access Management (IAM) solutions enable businesses to install granular access controls and permissions, ensuring that employees have access only to the data necessary for their roles, tightening the circle of users that can be involved in a breach.

If you minimize excessive privileges you can certainly reduce insider threats, as well as provide visibility into user activities. It enables businesses to detect and respond to suspicious behavior in real time.

Strengthens Data Protection

Businesses suffer severe consequences from data breaches. They can lead to things like:

Financial losses.

Reputational damage.

Regulatory penalties.

Limits Access to ‘As-Needed’ Basis

Access management helps strengthen data protection by limiting access to sensitive information and enforcing strong authentication measures.  For example, why would a manufacturer’s loading dock supervisor need to look up client financial information? Just make sure they have the client’s address.

Encryption, Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), and user authentication limit who can access what in a system. Access management solutions also enable organizations to track and control data transfers. This helps ensure that data remains secure throughout its lifecycle.

You mitigate your risks by implementing robust access controls,. They reduce the chance of unauthorized data access. As well as protect their most valuable assets.

Enhances Regulatory Compliance

Running afoul of data privacy compliance regulations can get very expensive, making this a top priority for many organizations. IAM solutions play a vital role in ensuring regulatory compliance by providing necessary controls and audit trails.

Among the best practices that IAM tools help companies adopt are:

Role-based access control (RBAC)

Least privilege principles

Contextual multi-factor authentication

By establishing strict access management controls, businesses can better show compliance with regulatory requirements. IAM solutions also help with regular access reviews by enabling organizations to maintain an accurate record of user access and permissions. This is an essential component of regulatory audits and assessments.

Streamlined User Provisioning and Deprovisioning

It’s a time-consuming process to manage user accounts and access privileges manually, but it’s also prone to human error. Just one mis-keyed entry can increase the risk of an account breach.

You can automate access management solutions, user provisioning, and de-provisioning, ensuring that employees have appropriate access rights throughout their employment lifecycle.

When you onboard a new employee to your organization, access management simplifies the process by quickly provisioning the necessary user accounts and permissions based on their role in the company.

Whenever an employee leaves the organization, IAM tools ensure prompt de-provisioning of accounts and the revocation of access rights. This reduces the risks of dormant or unauthorized accounts which can easily be found and exploited by hackers.

Remember that big data breach at Colonial Pipeline a few years back? That breach originated from an old, unused business VPN account that had never been de-provisioned properly.

Once you streamline user provisioning and de-provisioning you enhance overall security and improve your overall operational efficiency.

Secure Remote Access

Over the last decade, two things have largely changed the look of the traditional office. These are the rise of the remote workforce and the increasing reliance on cloud services. These changes make secure remote access vital for organizations.

By enabling users to access corporate resources and data with a greater measure of security, IAM solutions provide secure authentication and authorization mechanisms for remote users. IAM is there whether employees are working from home, traveling, or accessing data via mobile devices. Access management ensures that they can do so without compromising security.

It includes features like:

Virtual private networks (VPNs)

Single sign-on (SSO)

Multi-factor authentication (MFA)

These all help secure remote access while maintaining the integrity and confidentiality of corporate data.

Productivity Boost

Identity and access management systems also boost productivity. Imagine how much time your HR or IT services team spends provisioning user accounts. It can take a significant amount of time to add all those login credentials - not to mention deciding on user access permissions in each tool.

IAM systems automate this entire process. Using role-based access protocols, they can immediately assign the right level of access. If an employee leaves, the system can also immediately revoke access. This saves your administrative team considerable time and effort.