A modern identity & access management strategy accounts for how bad actors can breach an organization’s cloud environment. Today, multi-channel digital frameworks that include corporate email, workforce management systems, social media, digital storefronts, and remote log-ins offer ample opportunities for unauthorized network access.
With a modern IAM strategy, businesses can restrict user access, maintain regulatory compliance, and protect their valuable customer and user data. Modern security threats can be complex, but with the right software solutions, businesses can create custom IAM strategies that boost their productivity and scale with the network’s growth.
What are IAM Strategies?
An identity & access management strategy refers to an organization’s workflow surrounding the access control on its digital network. This includes how it implements access policies and restrictions, manages user identities, guides access to its corporate resources, and responds to security threats.
With the average ransomware attack costing businesses nearly $5 million, IAM strategies represent a significant potential ROI. Organizations with optimized security workflows can restrict unauthorized access to their networks, detect and lock down security threats, and increase productivity with readily available training resources.
Why Do Businesses Need Identity & Access Management Strategies?
Without effective IAM strategies, businesses expose their valuable user, customer, and company data to unauthorized access, which can lead to data breaches. Businesses have security responsibilities to their employees and clients, defined by compliance regulations in their industry.
To avoid a loss of consumer or client trust as well as financial and legal liabilities, compliant security systems protect business networks from any unauthorized access. Additionally, conventional network access management workflows are labor-intensive and prone to errors.
Manually assigning account access, generating permissions, and authenticating users can lead to costly security breaches, such as temporary log-in credentials that the IT team needs to be certain to deactivate. Businesses equipped with modern IAM solutions can offload tedious access management tasks to the system, reallocating their IT teams to more important issues.
For modern businesses, network inflexibility is one of the biggest obstacles to expansion. IAM strategies that are matched to the business’s network architecture and customized to the needs of their teams allow them to scale their operations without sacrificing security.
What to Look for in an IAM Software Solution
When deploying IAM software in your business, consider these steps to match the security solution to your network infrastructure successfully:
1. Understand Your Business’s Security Goals
Businesses planning to scale their networks or incorporate more remote workers over the next few quarters will have different security needs than those with an established cloud environment that they do not intend to change. Business leaders should recognize their regulatory compliance needs and the gaps in their IT productivity that could be resolved with the right IAM strategy.
2. Itemize Your Network
Modern corporate cloud environments are complex, often encompassing numerous users, hardware devices, data stores, network applications, learning resources, and more. With so many workers switching to hybrid and remote work models, businesses have an even greater responsibility to understand the scope of their IT networks before planning their identity & access management strategies.
3. Establish User Guidelines
Effective IAM strategies rely on established and consistently enforced user guidelines. An organization’s access policies should account for its significant security gaps, denoting the rules of user provisioning, enforcing temporary log-ins, and developing more secure password policies for all users. In addition to establishing user guidelines, businesses should communicate them clearly and update them regularly as compliance and security standards change.
4. Seek Enhanced IAM Solutions
Effective IAM strategies need to go beyond simple password policies and deploy more targeted controls, such as:
- Authentication: User authentication refers to verifying the identities of all users on the system to make sure that unauthorized users cannot access the company’s architecture.
- Authorization: User authorization defines and tracks the access permissions of all network users, ensuring they have access to the systems they need and lack access to systems that are not part of their workflows.
- User Behavior Monitoring: By monitoring user behavior such as log-in activity, account access, and resource access, business managers can more easily detect unauthorized users as well as improve their corporate resources.
- Identity Governance: Network identity governance allows managers to segregate employee duties and manage users’ roles within the system while generating analyses and reports that they can use to refine their security strategies as they scale their operations.
Contact an Experienced Cybersecurity Team to Optimize Your Identity & Access Management Strategy
IAM strategies allow businesses to refine their security workflows, increase productivity, and scale their networks without sacrificing client confidence. Advantage.Tech provides managed IT, consulting, and cybersecurity systems for over 800 clients across numerous industries.
Since phishers and bad actors have gained new methods to bypass conventional corporate security systems, organizations must respond with greater advances in IAM optimization to protect their employee credentials and sensitive data networks. Contact us today to learn how modern IAM strategies can protect your valuable user data from the latest threats.
