When companies grow exponentially- technology, people, and businesses become strongly intertwined that separating them becomes impossible. There are hundreds of people in the organization and these organizations own hundreds and thousands of identities for each member with millions of technological endpoints. Businesses are adopting a more hybrid work culture, and there is an enormous increase in the usage of applications and implementations, for maintaining seamless workflows.
But,
- Are these applications, implementations, and integrations secure enough to access?
- Are the identities protected from all kinds of malicious attacks or breaches?
- Is there no risk to the data shared across the internet shared through various identities?
Here’s when Identity Security comes into the picture!
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Identity security helps organizations transform their businesses digitally, without compromising user identities and sensitive business information. It’s an approach to safeguard the system information and control the users while they securely access resources.
Why Identity security so important for businesses?
- 80% of the breaches happening today are identity driven.
- Bring your own device (BYOD) accentuates the possibility of threats
- Attack surface has dramatically expanded.
- Attackers get access to a corporate account and cause great damage
- Increase in the number of cybercrimes, fraud, and intellectual property theft.
- Identity-driven attacks are very hard to detect.
- Finding the difference between the actual user and that of the hackers becomes difficult with traditional security tools and processes.
These security breaches can cause losses worth millions of dollars to the organizations. To protect and prevent the organization from any malicious attacks and threats, a strong and flexible identity security solution is much needed. The rapid shift of the organizations to the cloud and the digital transformations makes it even more important and Identity Security becomes the need of the hour.
Benefits of implementing Identity Security measures
If you wish to establish a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy, along with Identity security – you should include IT security, endpoint security, and container security. The solution must be integrated with the organization’s existing Identity and Access Management (IAM) tools and processes along with the Zero Trust architecture.
Identity Federation, IAM, and Open Standards – Magic behind a safe digital interaction!
Traditional security lacks reliability and the password system would only fail, making your organization vulnerable to attacks. Organizations must ensure the right accessibility at the right time for every user, right from the IT admin, remote worker, hybrid employees, third-party vendors, and even customers to maintain security and authorize each request when needed. This can help prevent a wide range of digital threats and supply chain attacks. All these can be achieved only through IAM (Identity and Access Management).
With IAM, you can manage your employees’ apps without logging in as an administrator. You can manage all the identities, including software, people, and hardware devices like robotics and IoT with Identity and Access Management. The IAM cloud identity tools are flexible and secure. With IAM, you can manage user identities, provision & de-provision users, authenticate & authorize the users, have Single Sign-on (SSO), and get you reports.
The protocols based on the Open Standards allow the federated organization to know who is interacting with them, what they are enabled to do and to believe that the interaction between them is secure.
How to implement Identity Security in your organization’s cyber security strategy?
Implementing strong authentication measures
MFA (Multi-factor authentication) is one of the Identity Security best practices, that empowers you to add multiple layers of authentication to your network and devices. This helps you prevent network breaches and decrease the probability of identity misuse.
For instance, you can have both passwords and fingerprints to detect suspicious login attempts and protect consumer identity.
Using biometrics
This is another way to improve identity security and prevent fake logins. There might be a situation where the intruders might get their hands on the credentials but having the biometrics will prevent any kind of malicious acts.
For instance, using physical characteristics like fingerprints or iris scans to verify the consumer’s real identity.
Zero – Trust policy
This policy ensures that each member of the organization is constantly identified and managed. Identity, Endpoints, Applications, Networks, Infrastructure, and Data will be protected at every layer to eliminate any data leaks. With this policy and IAM as a solution, users will be constantly monitored, to secure their user identities and access points.
Central Identity Management
One of the key principles of Zero Trust is to have centralized management for providing access to the resources at the identity levels. You can either migrate the users from other systems to a single one or synchronize your IAM with all the user directories within the given environment.
Managing access control
You can improve identity security by managing access control, where you limit the user’s access and have full control of the sensitive information of your organization. Admins can leverage security identities by restricting or provisioning the resources at an individual/ group level.
You can do this by creating role-based access control and having user permissions for all the confidential resources/systems
Enhancing security awareness
This is the most feasible and important practice that every organization should embrace to prevent identity theft and security threats. Educating the employees and creating awareness about the attacks/threats/theft across the digital platforms is very crucial.
You can throw more light on how to identify phishing emails, how and when to share personal information on digital platforms, reiterating the same frequency, will help eliminate any such scenarios.
Secured Privileged accounts
Not all accounts/users will have the same access to the resources or the sensitive data. Such privileged users and accounts can be given an extra tier of security support as they are the gatekeepers of the organization.
SOX Compliance
You can implement internal controls for assessing processes, ensure reliability and accuracy in the driven reports, and leverage data protection using SOX. On the whole, SOX encompasses business controls and IT controls. The end objective of this is to maintain accuracy and an error-free process throughout the business and IT processes.
Schedule-based review process
The main purpose of Schedule-based review is to ensure proper planning of events and tasks. The review can be scheduled weekly, bimonthly, or on monthly basis based on your organizational needs. Timely reviews of all the accounts, users, roles, credentials, and policies by the managers or the IT teams will help you monitor and refine the IAM policies to better adhere to least–privileged permissions.
SAML & OIDC – Secure integration
OIDC (OpenID Connect) helps you have a layer of protection on top of the existing authorization to cross-verify the end-user identity and obtain the profile information. With SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) in place will help you enable SSO (Single Sign-on) through which you can authenticate a user once and communicate it to multiple applications using the same credentials. SSO can help you reduce password fatigue, prevent shadow IT, improve security capabilities, and streamline the user experience.
The final thoughts!
For any organization, Identity Security should be the top priority. However, creating a balance between Identity security and still delivering a seamless user experience requires a lot of strategies and effort. A robust IAM solution can help you secure your identities and act as a game-changer for your organization.
When data breaches are becoming pretty frequent, save your organization from any kind of loss, NOW!!
