Governance in Identity Security - The BIG Challenge
Let’s start with some definitions: identity governance refers to monitoring users’ permissions and curtailing them as much as possible.
Fundamentally, this branch of cybersecurity refers to the philosophy – ‘Principle of Least Privilege’,
Limiting privileges and making sure access is granted on a need basis to keep the wheels of the business turning, ensures that no account can cause as much damage if hacked, which means that businesses need to be aware of who has what kind of user permissions, how they are being used, and whether those permissions are mandatory for their roles in the organization.
Of course, this is all seems more manageable but isn’t.
Firstly, you need to know all your users, which is quite tricky when you begin factoring in third parties. Secondly, you need to know the behaviors and devices, which can be tricky in the work-from-home era. Lastly, your company must have the ability to maintain consistent checks into users’ permissions during a sensitive time in the economy with high turnover rates.
It is indeed an uphill battle, in other words.
Even today, some enterprises try their best to maintain a record of who has what kind of user permissions with spreadsheets’ help. This is time consuming and error prone.
Access creeps and insider threats increase in these kinds of environments.
Identity Governance
Identity governance is necessary to bring next-generation role management to organizations of all sizes. (small scale as well as large scale) It operates by granting your governance team the most valuable resource in cybersecurity, which is nothing but visibility enabling your team to track and review all the user permissions in your company. Additionally, your team can decide whether to revoke permissions on any account at any given time, thus allowing your organization to start following the Principle of Least Privilege. Furthermore, you can begin using role management to create sets of permissions that go with each job title in your business.
User Access Attestation as an Identity and Access Governance function is an ongoing review and confirmation process that helps organizations reduces risk by ensuring that users the right access to data, systems and/or applications. Access attestation is not only good business practice but also required for compliance reasons.
How BAAR IGA Toolkit Helps
Although there are many Identity Management / Governance services and software packages or even custom built solutions to facilitate users access review, most of these require significant amount of one off or even on-going effort to design, build and fetch users access (entitlements) from a multitude of applications/systems.
BAAR IGA toolkit has a set of prebuilt workflows and connectors that are deployed in your network (also available as a SaaS or hybrid option in the cloud) and collect user access data from any number of applications at required intervals.
User-friendly interfaces are provided for scheduling the collection of user entitlements from various systems and facilitating routing and logging of attestation reviews and decisions by reviewers/certifiers. BAAR IGA toolkit also offers automated remediation of users’ access, based on reviewers’ decisions, for popular ERP systems like Oracle, Workday, SAP, etc. and directory services like Active Directory and Azure AD.
Deploying BAAR takes hours (if leveraging pre-built connectors) or days (for custom applications/systems) rather than months.
Moreover, the BAAR IGA toolkit monitors terminated users and points out which completed users still have access to systems.
This helps reduce the risk of your data being in the wrong hands.
Reach out to the BAAR team or any of our partners to know how we can automate the user attestation process for your organization.
Reach out to the BAAR team to learn more about how we can automate your organization’s user attestation process.
Please write to us at [email protected].
