Why is Identity and Access Management (IDAM) critical for modern IT set-up?

About modern IT set-up

The number of digital identities is proliferating ceaselessly in every IT setup. The influence of hybrid work environments, the advent of cloud computing, and exponential growth in business automation processes have led to a drastic change in IT environments, which now require lots of users with both human and non-human identities to perform different IT tasks. 

Every end-user has an individual identity and obtains access to the organization’s IT resources to perform their administrative and operational tasks. However, how do organizations respond when it comes to monitoring, controlling, and securing those identities? At the end of the day, security is determined by how identities are managed and how their life cycles are governed. After all, unmonitored and uncontrolled identities are the most vulnerable IT components that can be compromised by insiders and third parties. They are the sources of breaches, data exfiltration, and snooping in most cases. 

About Identities

Firstly, let’s talk about an IT misconception over here. The misconception is that privileged identities or identities with elevated rights are more vulnerable to insider and third-party threats. However, it doesn’t require a cyber specialist to bust this myth. A basic non-privileged identity, if compromised, can be devastating for the organization in terms of data loss, financial loss, and reputation loss.

Moreover, errors can happen very often through a non-privileged user or a standard IT user. There are instances when a standard end-user has tried unauthorized access and compromised enterprise critical data assets. In other cases, they leave their accounts logged in by mistake, and the system falls prey to unknown and unauthorized access.

A strong identity administration and governance framework can assist organizations in establishing a proper identity and access management fabric with a well-defined entitlement policy, both on-premises and across multiple cloud platforms.

The question is how to effectively and securely govern the identities and access control mechanisms across these multi-cloud environments. Not only must human identities be protected, but so must machine identities, privileged identities, and non-privileged identities be controlled and governed. The maximum number of users in any organization is the standard non-privileged application users who access different resources, consoles, and workloads for day-to-day activities. This has left organizations open to severe data breach risks.

About Identity and Access Management

ARCON | Identity Access Management (IDAM/IAM) solution holds the key to managing digital identities and enabling robust authentication before allowing access to an organization’s digital assets. IT security teams use IDAM/IAM solutions to securely control users’ access to IT resources across on-premise and cloud infrastructure.

Before addressing the benefits of this tool, let us check out how IDAM solution manages the life cycle at different levels

 

The comprehensiveness of this tool lies in the automation of end-user identity management. It ensures the identity lifecycle management through rule and role-based access control capabilities of every identity.

• Provisioning of a user in the IT infrastructure includes updating the rights, roles, and accesses for a single or any set of applications. If the user’s department is shifted or transferred to another department, then the user is de-provisioned from the existing role and provisioned for a different role. This prevents unnecessary access to irrelevant applications.

• IDAM/IAM authenticates existing or third-party users in different layers of systems with the help of authentication tools like PRECISION, VOICETRUST, SAFARAN, GEMALTO, VASCO, etc.

• Passwords are the most vulnerable aspects of the IT security infrastructure. In identity management, complex passwords, set by any user can be updated manually or can be rotated as per the defined policy. With the help of the RPA Bot (Robotic Process Automation Bot), IDAM/IAM automates this password rotation and ensures proper synchronization across the network to prevent password manipulation or misuse by any user.

• Who does not want the end-user activity to be monitored to stay updated with his/her activities? Continuous session monitoring aids IT administrators in detecting anything suspicious about the identities. A live dashboard with all the end-user activities indirectly helps in regular auditing.

• Compliance regulators demand comprehensive reports on end-user activities on every system and application. For this, organizations need to maintain comprehensive audit trails of every activity. ARCON | IDAM’s reporting mechanism helps the IT security team stay audit-ready with detailed analytics of every end-user accessing target systems or applications.

• Controlling and securing critical information is the basic necessity of IT security initiatives. Identity governance controls the information of the employees, partners, and clients, and provides authentication and authorization to the system with approved user identities. This proactive approach of ARCON | IDAM or IAM eliminates the security gaps and protects the sensitive business information of all the registered accounts in the organization.

• Lastly, global compliance with guidelines mandated by various regulatory authorities and IT standards plays a big role in ensuring data security, implementing adequate IT security policies, and, above all, maintaining digital trust and reliability. By following the mandates, IDAM/IAM strengthens the overall IT risk management and compliance framework of any organization.

Conclusion

As organizations continue to embrace digital transformation, identities have become more diverse in nature. They are not limited to only human users-there are applications, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, APIs, and other micro-services. Cloud adoption has further increased the necessity for effective identity and access management policies across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. ARCON | IDAM or IAM is a perfect fit for the requirements of a modern organization.