IT security best practice keeps evolving, regardless of whether businesses claim that they are well aware of them. Furthermore, this knowledge is of little benefit if pre-empted actions to prevent mishaps are not taken. With IT infrastructures within companies becoming increasingly complex, it is becoming all the more important for organizations to become proactive about IT/Cyber Security.
In this case, the problem seldom lies with lack of awareness, but is attributed to lethargic attitude towards embracing requisite IT security measures. That’s precisely what experts point at when they express their disappointment with the adoption of IAM technology.
In addition to this, it is found that business decision-makers are unable to grasp its benefits in terms of IT Security best practices. Now, we are on this task! In order to bring about a change, we have listed what makes IAM – an IT Security Best Practice:
Best Practice #1 – Ensuring Robust Automation and Optimization of Resources
Security considerations must not bar your users to achieve optimal returns from the system. From Access governance, MFA to SSO, IAM should ensure that the right user is in possession of requisite information/data while conducting one’s task. The core objective of your IAM initiatives needs to be to simplify business processes and line-of-business interactions. By developing the right role as a partnership between IT and the line of business, it is easier to make sure that the relevant entitlements are included and the unnecessary ones are excluded from the roles.
Best Practice #2 – Making Sure the Business is Protected against Security Threats
As a comprehensive user-point security solution, IAM is about gatekeeping Identities and Access to the digital world. IAM brings features such as stronger password policies along with multi-factor authentication capabilities for access to sensitive systems for privileged accounts.
Imagine a scenario where you discover that employees are using their company laptops with account access to sensitive systems for a public hacking marathon. The lack of access management not only limits audit activity, but your business would not even be in the position to track, report and account for the systems that have been accessed during this hacking spree. There is no way of identifying whether any sensitive data or system has been compromised.
While you could terminate these employees, your organization will still have to invest significant resources to manually track down the access, privileges and passwords. With no form of governance in place or protection against weak passwords, an event such as this can prove to be catastrophic to current as well as future operations of your business.
Best Practice #3– Making IT Security Affordable and Effective
Whether it is for on-premise solution or cloud based IAM, a well-structured identity management is able to deliver huge efficiency savings. However, badly designed structures can not only soak up valuable resources but will also automate and increase existing problems, hereby costing the company more with regards to a cleanup exercise. With a very clear idea of your goals and expert help in IAM implementation, simple tasks such as your password reset approach can minimize helpdesk time. Similarly, deploying a single sign-on solution is known to cut costs drastically without putting the security of your IT infrastructures at risk.
Best Practice #4 –Adopting Unbeatable Audit and Monitoring Capabilities
With the help of an IAM solution in place, your business is able to make sure that all access into your systems is monitored at all times and that relevant persons are alerted about unauthorized or unusual access at all times.
Taking into account the recent incidents pertaining to the loss of critical business data, data protection is one of the topmost priorities for most organizations. IAM should act as the first line of defence in Data Loss Prevention (DLP). By using the right IAM tools in context with DLP tools, businesses enjoy enhanced monitoring capabilities.
Best Practice #5 –Investing in Intelligent IT that Strategically Adapts to the needs of your System.
Your IAM should take care of businesses’ strategic requirements. Conduct research before devising a strategy and implementation plan. The idea is to evaluate requirements against various capabilities and correlate them to the strategic value you receive out of this exercise for enhanced IT security.
Assess your current IAM situation and understand what application resources are within your purview. Understand which user groups need to authenticate what resources and also assess what applications have been implemented outside of your IT department’s control for holistic security measures.
Organizations that rely on IAM tools have immediate capabilities to mitigate catastrophes. In addition, these organizations are able to benefit from – Immediate reporting on governance, develop the ability of provisioning/de-provisioning users in no time.
