How Important is Access Management to Your Cybersecurity?

How trusting are you? Let’s say you reside in a nice quiet suburban neighborhood and are on great terms with the people who live on your block.

Does that mean you would give everybody the keys to your house and the code to your alarm system?

The answer is probably NO, right?

So why would you treat your company’s data and network security any differently and leave everything open to anyone who happens to be ‘on the clock?’

Disregarding your Cybersecurity is like leaving your front door open and waiting to find out who among your neighbors will rob you. 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.

Research by Zippia finds that the average employee uses 36 cloud-based services every workday, so 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.

Login credential theft is a well-paying crime for hackers. Various online accounts can be a goldmine on the Dark Web, the online Black Market for stolen data. Depending on the size or stature of an organization, an email administrator’s login can command between $500 to $140,000.

Does your network security strategy include strict access management? If not, you could suffer serious financial consequences. Not to mention the loss of reputation that comes with a data breach. A severe data 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 examine six reasons access control and management has become essential to good data security. It plays a pivotal role in safeguarding valuable assets and ensuring data integrity.

How important is access control?

1) It guards against insider threats

Most employees don’t mean to be a threat, but Insider threats can result from malicious actions by disgruntled employees or unintentional errors by well-meaning but untrained employees. They can come from employees within an organization or their breached accounts. Identity & Access Management (IAM) solutions enable businesses to install granular access controls and permissions. This ensures that employees have access only to the data necessary for their roles, tightening the circle of users that can be involved in a breach.

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

2) It strengthens data protection

Data breaches hold severe consequences for any business. The worst of the damages:

Financial losses.

Reputational damage.

Regulatory penalties.

3) Establishes a ‘need to know’ protocol

Want stronger data protection? Adopt access management. This limits access to sensitive information and enforces strong authentication measures. For example, why would a manufacturer’s loading dock supervisor need to look up client financial information? They don’t need any of that.

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) limits 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.

Robust access controls help mitigate risks. They reduce the chance of unauthorized data access. As well as providing an extra layer of protection for your company’s most valuable assets.

4) Enhanced regulatory compliance

Compliance with data privacy laws should be a top priority for many organizations because non-compliance can get very expensive. IAM solutions play a vital role in ensuring regulatory compliance. They provide necessary controls and audit trails.

IAM tools also help companies adopt best practices, such as:

Role-based access control (RBAC)

Least privilege principles

Contextual multi-factor authentication

Businesses can better show compliance with regulatory requirements by establishing strict access management controls. 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.

5) Streamlines user provisioning and deprovisioning

It’s time-consuming 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.

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

When a new hire joins an organization, access management simplifies the onboarding process by quickly provisioning the necessary user accounts and permissions based on their role in the company.

Then, when 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.

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

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

More secure remote access

Two factors have largely changed the look of the traditional office in the last decade. These are the rise of the remote workforce and the increasing reliance on cloud services. This change makes secure remote access vital for organizations.

IAM solutions provide secure authentication and authorization mechanisms for remote users by enabling them to access corporate resources and data with a greater measure of security. IAM is there whether employees are traveling, working from home, 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.

6) Improves Productivity

You certainly boost productivity by using an identity and access management system. 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.