Why Effective Identity & Access Management is So Important: The 8 Reasons Your Organization Needs to Get It Right
Especially for large enterprise companies that have increased cyber threats in line with business growth from both outside and in.
Here are 8 reasons that make an effective IAM strategy so important:
- Ensure Correct Access Is Given to the Correct People
- Conform to Regulatory Compliance
- Reduce Human Error
- Streamline IT Workflows
- Improve Data Security
- Improve Data Confidentiality
- Benefit From a Centralized Identity Store
- Insider Threats Can Be Detected in Real-Time
1. Ensure Correct Access Is Given to the Correct People
The most crucial role of an IAM strategy is to ensure that the right people have access to the data and systems they need, at the right time.
More importantly, it’s about ensuring that access doesn’t fall into the hands of the wrong people.
All parties, whether employees, customers, vendors, or contractors, should only have access to what is required to do their job or interact with the organization to limit security risks. This should be covered by both the employee IAM policies and your CIAM (customer IAM) policies.
2. Conform to Regulatory Compliance
Regulatory compliance is required by all organizations in all industries. Of course, some industries are subject to greater levels of compliance than others.
Common requirements that need to be met are GDPR and HIPAA. The maintenance of which is heavily supported by your IAM strategy due to putting limitations on, for example, the employees who have access to customer data.
3. Reduce Human Error
An effective IAM strategy removes the requirement for IT teams to manually choose and set privilege or permission settings.
This is a process that can be automated with comprehensive IAM policies that outline which teams and individual work roles are to be allowed access to which systems.
Removing the requirement for manual intervention removes the possibility of any human error caused by IT teams granting the wrong access to employees.
4. Streamline IT Workflows
No longer having to commit time to manually managing access rights to data, the IT team can streamline their workflow significantly, allowing them to prioritize high-value and time-restrictive work.
This, coupled with other automation as part of your comprehensive strategy, such as automated reporting, creates a working environment more conducive to productivity and prioritizing the most pressing tasks.
5. Improve Data Security
Generally speaking, the better grasp an organization has on who is accessing what, the fewer security risks the organization is presented with.
Of course, this is a sweeping generalization, and no organization is completely averse to risk. Yet, increasing control over user access to systems means fewer individuals accessing data that they aren’t required to access, mitigating a lot of potential data breaches.
6. Improve Data Confidentiality
When the term confidential data is used, highly regulated industries like law, financial services, and hospitals often come to mind.
But the concept that data confidentiality isn’t as crucial in less regulated industries couldn’t be further from the truth. With ever-evolving regulatory compliance requirements, confidentiality is applicable to all companies – even down to solopreneur course creators, but particularly for large-scale enterprises. Because every single customer deserves confidence that their data is being handled correctly, no matter who is holding it.
A thorough IAM strategy allows a company to restrict users from seeing certain digital assets that are deemed confidential, reducing the risks of any confidential data breaches.
7. Benefit From a Centralized Identity Store
As an organization grows, so does its landscape of employees, devices, departments, buildings, and even sub-companies.
Having the right IAM systems in place allows for centralized storage of all identities across the company. This includes biometrics, pins, tokens, and more.
Centralized storage of identities allows for automated changes to privilege and permission criteria, as well as provisioning and de-provisioning unique IDs or identities.
8. Insider Threats Can Be Detected in Real-Time
As an organization grows, threats become larger from both inside and outside of the organization.
Cybersecurity programs are tailored to reduce external threats. However, internal threats are a little more challenging to detect when using typical security tools and techniques.
This is where the benefits of a modern IAM strategy come into play. An IAM program that harnesses the power of machine learning can model behaviors happening within an organization – detecting any abnormal behavior and raising an alert to the threat in real-time.
Check out our article on how artificial intelligence is having an impact on cybersecurity for more.
Creating an IAM strategy right through to execution and ongoing maintenance is no easy task.
If you’re looking for an implementation partner to support you in developing or refining the IAM strategy for your organization, visit our IAM solutions page to find out more about how RediMinds can support you.