Identity Management Is an Essential Part of Any Cybersecurity Strategy

“Identity is the new perimeter.” Security experts have repeated this catchphrase for at least 10 years. It started when organizations began large-scale adoption Software-as-a-Service applications, and the workforce became increasingly mobile. These trends created a porous network perimeter that’s difficult to secure.

Remote and hybrid work models, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and third-party access have further eroded the network perimeter. In order to protect sensitive applications and data, organizations must ensure that only authorized users are able to access them. However, many organizations continue to struggle with identity and access management (IAM).

Faced with growing numbers of users, machines and applications that require access to IT resources, many organizations devote significant time and effort to the task of adding, changing and deleting user identities and permissions. In many organizations, user identities must be manually updated across disparate applications and resources, leading to mistakes and delays that impact productivity and increase the risk of a security breach.

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IAM Inefficiencies

In a Dimensional Research survey of more than 1,000 IT security professionals, 52 percent said they are managing 10,000 or more identities. Almost all (96 percent) said they use multiple IAM tools. In 41 percent of organizations, IT teams must access at least 25 different systems — including IAM tools, in-house systems, directory services and SaaS applications — to manage identities and access rights.

Most organizations recognize the need to consolidate IAM tools. In the Dimension Research survey, respondents reported that IT admins spend too much time performing redundant tasks and use too many tools to gain expertise in any of them. Gaps in coverage create risk and make it more difficult to respond to evolving threats. These issues have a bottom-line impact — 42 percent of respondents said that identity management inefficiencies cost their organizations more than $100,000 per year.

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Developing an Effective Strategy

Effective identity and access management is more than a tool, however. Organizations must start by streamlining the creation and maintenance of user attributes, credentials and entitlements, and develop a framework for managing user roles and assigning privileges. The “access” component involves the application of corporate policies to enterprise systems. This helps ensure that users — employees, customers, partners, machines and applications — have secure and seamless access to the resources that correspond to their profiles.

To be successful, IAM requires a strategic approach that considers all elements of the identity infrastructure. Organizations must integrate identity information across the enterprise — but with respect for authoritative sources of identity. For example, it may be unrealistic to force HR personnel to stop using their internal applications in favor of a centralized identity repository and its associated interfaces.

Policies and processes must be developed around the provisioning of access entitlements. These policies should follow least-privilege access principles — users should be granted the access they need to do their jobs and no more. Entitlements should also be reviewed regularly to ensure they still match the user’s role.

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How DeSeMa Can Help

Developing an IAM strategy can be an imposing challenge for many organizations. IAM initiatives often have political and technological considerations, and typically require tough policy decisions and operational changes. That’s why it’s helpful to partner with an IT consultant with specific expertise in identity management.

The experienced consultants at DeSeMa can assess your IAM processes to identify redundancies, inefficiencies and security gaps. We can identify all the systems and devices in your environment, including those machines and applications with identities and credentials. All too often, machine identities are poorly managed and applications have passwords hard-coded in clear text, creating critical vulnerabilities.

We can then help you consolidate IAM platforms and eliminate identity “silos” that sap IT productivity. In many cases, organizations can improve identity management by taking better advantage of the tools they already have.

Efficient identity management has become a necessity with ever-increasing numbers of users, applications and information resources, many of which sit outside the traditional network perimeter. Let DeSeMa help you develop a comprehensive approach to identity management that makes the entire network infrastructure more secure and easier to manage.