Governing Access, Controlling Costs

Fast growing organizations have large group of users, including the partners, suppliers, customers and employees having access to sensitive company information. For such organizations security and maintaining access control over a wide range of network becomes a major issue. Governing access to organizational resources helps in managing risk related to security such as controlling and monitoring access to company assets and sensitive data, imposing separation of duties as inappropriate access to critical data may result into inaccurate or fraudulent transactions. It also helps in addressing regulatory requirements (e.g.: SOX, JSOX, ISO 27001, etc.) and needs of various stakeholders (e.g.: users, suppliers, owners, auditors, etc.). Organizations with typical IT architecture are more vulnerable to threats and frauds. Such architecture provides multiple identity stores and administration points, redundant data synchronization and replication and user authentication for each application, resulting into increased burden on IT resources and increase in the cost of complying with regulatory requirements. Replacing age-old IT architecture with new Incident and Access Management (I&AM) architecture provides solutions such as Active Directory, Single Sign-on, Security Tokens, and many more products. The I&AM architecture provides a single, integrated framework that automates the management of user identities in and out of the organization. It provides a single identity store and administration point, reduced replication and synchronization of data, single sign-on and the ability to present multiple data views.

I&AM solutions provide a secure framework that allows an organization to leverage its IT assets and new computing models like Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS); while reducing total cost and ensuring compliance. Organizations imposing access and identity management procedures are able to identify and eliminate security threats in their provisioning systems by establishing a process for accessing company assets, terminate access immediately for the ones who leave the organization, continuous monitoring of access logs and practicing a good password management process. Identity management solutions integrates various business systems in an organization, including directories, operating platforms, network storage and partner systems. For instance, when a new user joins the organization, his / her identity is provisioned automatically, and his / her access permissions, passwords and identity are synchronized across networked systems. The user does not have to wait for days to access applications and systems and can get their jobs done from the moment they join the organization. Governing access also helps in monitoring the number of orphan accounts in an organization. An Orphan Account is an account belonging to a user who has left the organization. Having large number of Orphan accounts in an organization can lead to security and compliance breaches, internal and external data breaches and identity frauds. Many times, employees in an organization make use of orphan accounts to steal information from the system, cause harm to company assets as a result of taking revenge or simply to play mischief leading to security breach. Keeping a check on the number of orphaned accounts and having proper access and identity management procedures in place to locate orphaned account helps in avoiding fraud. I&AM process helps in preventing unauthorized access to system by continuous monitoring of privileges across the organization and minimizes the time and cost of spent in managing access related risk. It provides reasonable assurance to the partners and customers by providing a secure access to business-critical systems and data, thereby increasing their productivity.

The organizations leading in governing access gain substantial financial benefits as compared to those lagging organizations; including increase in user productivity, reduced risk, improved security and compliance, and decreased in the total cost.

About Author:

Onkar Lalla is a Consultant and an important part of the Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd.  think tank. Within Systems Plus, he actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. He can be contacted at onkar.l@spluspl.com