Increasing Stringent Regulatory Compliance Landscape: How well equipped is your IAM Security Posture? 

The Context: Increasing Stringency of Regulatory Compliances 

In today’s prevalent hybrid data hosting models, organizations generate data more frequently and regularly. The IT security team not just has to secure on-prem and cloud resources/ applications but also a host of other IT assets. Managing machine identities, enforcing access control around APIs, ensuring role-based access control (RBAC) are some of the other daily use-cases. 

Moreover, there are hundreds of end-users, third-party users, partners, and suppliers who continuously require access to the critical systems to perform daily tasks. It is the IT security team’s responsibility to ensure that enterprise data is accessible only to authorized end users regardless of the hosting models (on-premises or on-cloud). 

Business enterprises under these changing circumstances are facing more challenges. Against this backdrop, global regulatory compliance standards are continuously upgrading their respective laws, modules, and guidelines to strengthen IT security infrastructure in organizations. It is happening across the globe in multiple geographic regions so that the practice of identity and access management (IAM) can control and restrict access to the IT environment where each identity is administered and governed. 

• The regulatory compliance landscape in India took a new turn after the official announcement of the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, August 2023. This new act adopts a more improved, and advanced approach to data protection and data privacy. Whether it is leisure (hospitality industry), finance, health, education or even official government work, this new law is going to enforce and entrust data fiduciary across every industry for better data security practices. 

• The RBI (Reserve Bank of India) has issued the final Reserve Bank of India (Information Technology Governance, Risk, Controls and Assurance Practices) Master Directions 2023 that has come into force from April 1, 2024. It is to consolidate instructions on rules and regulations framed under various Acts, including banking issues and foreign exchange transactions and serves as a single reference point for regulatory matters. 

• The United Arab Emirates (UAE) cybersecurity council issued a statement that it is developing three new policies aimed to bolster the nation’s cybersecurity system and expected to be regulated by the end of 2024. These upcoming laws and regulations are going to focus on data encryption, data protection and data transmission. Therefore, data integrity, data security and data privacy will be the core of these foundational security policies. 

• With the growing cyber security awareness in the UAE, NESA (National Electronic Security Authority) has taken collective responsibility for information technology, digital innovation, and data security. There has been a new set of security guidelines for most government entities and others which are identified as critical by NESA. Hence, compliance with NESA becomes mandatory for most of the business entities. 

• A pivotal European Union regulation DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) is designed to enhance the operational resilience of digital systems that support financial institutions operating in European markets. The stringency of DORA aims at strengthening the IT security of financial entities such as banks, insurance companies and investment firms and ensuring that the financial sector in Europe can stay resilient in the event of a severe operational disruption. 

IAM solutions ensure Compliance 

Based on region and industry, organizations must follow the regulations on data privacy, data integrity, and data security. Complying with regulatory mandates becomes extremely easy as the IT security staff can ensure effectiveness and continuity of IT operations and build a baseline security policies of Identity & Access Management (IAM) posture. Business enterprises can have effective policies that protect end-user accounts, conduct regular audits, and revoke elevated rights of any identity if anything anomalous is found.  

A robust IAM posture enables an organization to take control of the management and monitoring of all the identities to comply with the access control requirements that are consistent with regulatory standards. It is critical for organizations seeking to strengthen their adherence to compliance standards. 

A couple of statistics show that investments in IAM are not keeping up with the number of identity breaches. “2023 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report” claims that 40% of breaches are credential (identity)-related. Gartner, at the same time, in “Gartner IAM modernization Preventing Identity-first Security Survey” reveals that 66% of organizations are not investing enough in IAM and 47% of organizations are understaffed in IAM. It shows the lack of necessary investments in IAM space among organizations.  

How can ARCON solutions help to meet the regulatory compliance requirements? 

Post deployment, ARCON’s stack of IAM solutions helps organizations to meet compliance mandates automatically without any manual intervention. 

• Privileged Access Management (PAM) builds an identity security posture where every identity is managed, controlled, monitored and governed to meet access control related compliance requirements and prevent chances of unauthorized access. 

• Endpoint Privilege Management (EPM) helps organizations to detect insider threats, compromised identities, and other malicious attempts on the endpoints. It has a powerful tool that meets any compliance requirement related to User Behavioural Analytics of the anomalous identities in the network. 

• Security Compliance Management (SCM) solution enables organizations to identify compliance irregularities by assessing the systems against the organization-specific information security and configuration baseline policies resulting in identifying the possible risks. It enhances visibility towards the information security posture of an organization for disparate technology platforms and enables enterprises to adhere to various IT security standards for compliance purposes. 

• ARCON’s Cloud Governance (CG) solution helps organizations to ensure cloud compliance including the mandates of FedRAMP, NIST, SOC2 etc. It automatically builds access control frameworks, least privilege access, remote access, authentication management, continuous monitoring, audit & accountability etc. 

• ARCON’s My Vault assists organizations with a centralized repository to protect, store and share confidential and sensitive business information securely. Regulatory compliance rules demanding data security, data privacy and data integrity can be met with this integrated tool. 

• Global Remote Access (GRA) solution supports organizations to meet remote access or remote security related compliances in the most secure way. It provides third-party access to the IT infrastructure as it is built on a zero-trust framework. 

• ARCON’s Drift Management enables organizations to proactively eliminate threats that arise from application drifts before they become a challenge for the resilient IT posture and digital ecosystem. Hence, it effectively identifies discrepancies, non-compliances, or variances allowing IT security pros to investigate and rectify as soon as possible. 

Conclusion 

The proliferation of identities in hybrid work environments and increasing stringency of regulatory compliances necessitate the adherence to meeting the mandates of IT standards. Deployment of ARCON’s IAM solutions helps organizations to comply with the mandates automatically with no manual intervention.