Identity Management
How to manage permissions and access?
Challenge
After a period of pandemic restrictions, many companies switched to a hybrid mode of operation. One of them was an e-commerce organization that came to our experts for help. The company had no security measures in place to manage permissions and access to company resources. Meanwhile, one of the employees who left the organization took advantage of the still active access credentials. He took advantage of his former employer’s carelessness to steal confidential data about the customers he worked with.
Threats can come not only from outside but also from within the organization. Therefore, the path to take when granting permissions and accesses is the Zero Trust philosophy. At its core is the belief that access credentials always need to be verified. Even if the user is connecting from the same device and IP address. Until a virtual identity is fully verified, any attempt to connect to resources should be viewed as a potential attempt by a cybercriminal to launch an attack.
What challenges did the company face?
- Lack of identity verification tools.
- Lack of solutions to control access, including privileged access.
- Lack of analytics and automation tools for identity verification, based on artificial intelligence.
Solution
Identity and Access Management solutions enable automatic verification of the digital identity of individuals requesting access to resources. They allow authentication of the user, the application and the infrastructure from which the login occurs. Based on a number of variables – based on questions such as who you are, what you need, why you need it, who confirmed access and when they did it – the system decides whether to grant access, deny access or use additional tools to confirm identity. An IAM-class solution for managing virtual employee identities is SecurID Identity Governance
An important group of employees are administrators and those with privileged access. Their departure from the organization may involve special risks. Privileged Access Management (PAM) tools allow verification of the level of privileged access. Thanks to them, the security team is able to accurately determine the level of access to each user’s resources, the ability of the user to perform activities, as well as their exact scope. In addition, PAM tools make it possible to grant access to systems and applications. This type of solution is, for example, the CyberArk PAM module, available as part of the CyberArk identity management platform.
Effects
The introduction of identity and access management solutions has helped reduce the risk of confidential data being lost or copied.
