Reasons Why Identity and Access Management is Important

Common Reasons Why Identity and Access Management is Crucial

Let’s explore the essential aspects that illustrate the importance of identity and access management.

Safeguarding digital identities

One essential characteristic of identity management is ensuring user access control and safeguarding their digital identities, effectively preventing data breaches, identity theft, and unauthorized access to valuable data.

Complying with regulations

In order to adhere to industry regulations, such as HIPAA, GDPR, and CCPA, it is crucial for organizations to maintain alignment with the most up-to-date requirements. Most IAM solutions come with tools that cater for these regulations out-of-the-box, which helps to save time and reduces manual effort.

Minimizing human errors

Implementing an IAM solution alleviates the need for manual configuration of privileges and permissions, reducing the possibility of errors. With IAM, the IT department no longer needs to manually handle access rights for user or employee accounts as this process becomes automated.

Improved confidentiality

Ensuring data confidentiality is a crucial aspect of cybersecurity. By implementing identity and access management solutions, organizations can effectively limit access to digital assets, files, and applications, thereby bolstering the security of sensitive data. Additionally, IAM solutions allow project managers and security professionals to have a clear understanding of users and their respective roles, projects and assets.

Improved accessibility

IAM enables all users to access resources via a centralized service, providing them with a range of authentication options such as multi-factor authentication, SSO, and biometric authentication. Additionally, IAM allows admins to control the level of user interaction with security systems, thereby reducing the risk of unauthorized attempts.

Single Sign-On (SSO) capabilities

SSO greatly enhances user experience by providing a secure authentication method for multiple apps, platforms, services, and websites using just one set of credentials. SSO eliminates the burden of managing and remembering numerous unique passwords and login credentials for different services.

Simplicity through centralized control

IAM relies on a unified database, which effectively handles distinct sets of identities (such as biometric data, email addresses, PINs, hardware tokens, etc.) for each employee. As a result, automating the allocation and revocation of roles and access privileges to employees becomes effortless. With all data stored in a central repository, the IAM solution efficiently performs a range of automated tasks that would otherwise prove inefficient if done manually.

Streamlined resource integrations

Resource integration occurs during the acquisition of one organization by another. This integration includes the incorporation of the acquired organization’s identities and confidential files. Storing these identities in various repositories can lead to human errors and allow unauthorized users to have excessive privileges. Fortunately, IAM solutions efficiently manage multiple resources and identities, ensuring that access privileges and roles are properly managed without introducing any anomalies.

Enhanced security automation

Using IAM, organizations can streamline the process of implementing access certificates and renewals across different corporate systems and devices. This is now a mandatory practice across certain industries. For instance, organizations must undergo SOX certifications to ensure the reliability of their financial reporting process. Failure to comply with these mandates can result in significant penalties. By implementing IAM solutions, tasks such as compliance checks and security updates can be automated, reducing the risk of human error and negligence. IAM also allows organizations to assign specific time intervals, such as quarterly or half-yearly, to ensure that all SOX applicable systems have been re-certified.

Improved data security capabilities

As an organization grows, its IT infrastructure tends to become more complex. New devices and identities are constantly being added, which makes it challenging to manage the security of the system manually or with traditional tools. Overlooking appropriate access rights and privileges can have long-term consequences for the organization. Using IAM to manage access privileges and security policies reduces the time required to implement security measures.

Unique identities for all users

To eliminate the tedious task of creating unique identities for all users, organizations should use solutions that can automate the process of assigning unique identities to everyone associated with the organization’s infrastructure, including employees, users, and contractors. By automatically provisioning and de-provisioning individuals with unique IDs and assigning them appropriate roles and responsibilities, these solutions greatly reduce manual effort and minimize the risk of human error.

Unified incident response management

Using multiple incident management tools can create complexity for administrators and security professionals, creating potential security vulnerabilities. IAM serves as a security framework that includes various incident response tools capable of detecting internal and external threats in real-time. These tools automatically alert security professionals or IT administrators through notifications sent to their inbox or mobile device. Furthermore, IAM enables easy tracing of data breaches or privilege abuse from different locations or IP addresses.

Automated account management

Forgetting or misplacing authentication credentials and then filing support tickets creates added challenges for the IT team. Resolving these issues manually is a time-consuming and expensive process. To address these problems, organizations can adopt an IAM solution, which enable users to establish new passwords or use alternative authentication methods without the need for human intervention. Advanced IAM systems incorporate criteria-based identity management, automating workflows such as access requests, access certifications, provisioning, and password management.

Real-Time detection of insider threats

While organizations primarily focus on external threats and cyber-attacks to ensure uninterrupted workflow for employees, detecting internal threats using conventional security tools and methods proves to be extremely difficult. However, IAM solutions that use machine learning (ML) algorithms can effectively recognize internal threats and alert security professionals for swift action.

Streamlined integrations with Native Cloud IAM Solutions

The cloud-native architecture follows a cloud-first approach, prioritizing cloud services and storage over conventional on-premise environments. As a result, securing native cloud apps and services with traditional tools can be challenging. However, using an IAM solution simplifies the integration of cloud-native services and platforms while maintaining strict security measures.

How Lepide Helps with Identity and Access Management

Lepide offers a comprehensive solution for identity and access management, which can aggregate and correlate event logs from multiple platforms, both on-premise and cloud-based. It enables you to easily identify and track users with administrative privileges, as well as understand how they obtained those permissions. Additionally, Lepide allows you to identify users with excessive permissions based on their data usage patterns.

Lepide can help assess and clean up your Active Directory, identifying and addressing issues such as inactive users, troublesome accounts, and over-privileged users. With Lepide’s identity and access management solution, gaining a thorough understanding of privileged user behavior becomes effortless. You can track the number of privileged users, receive real-time alerts for any anomalous behavior, and monitor their interactions with sensitive data. The platform also allows you to audit logon/logoff activity and password resets, providing a comprehensive view of the behavior and hierarchy of your privileged accounts.

If you’d like to see how the Lepide Data Security Platform can help you comply with identity and access management, schedule a demo with one of our engineers.