IAM is an integral part of your business’ security framework. It’s how employees, customers, and partners authenticate themselves when they use different software suites within your organization. It’s how you ensure that employees only have access to specific systems, data, and backend systems they need based on their job role. And it’s how you manage privileged accounts.
What Is IAM?
Many businesses still need clarification on what is identity access management? And how it benefits the firm. Identity Access Management, or IAM, is a set of technologies and business processes that help people in your organization gain the proper access to the right tools at the right time for the right reasons. It also enables you to stay compliant with security and privacy regulations.
An IAM system comprises three major components: identity, authentication, and authorization. Identity manages how users are identified on your network, whether by username, password, or more secure methods like biometrics. Authentication is verifying that someone is who they say they are when logging onto your systems. This is typically done with multi-factor or adaptive authentication.
Once a person’s identity has been confirmed, the next step is to authorize their access to specific applications and resources. This is often done with managed policies based on roles, projects, location, or security clearance. Sometimes, it may be a more manual process involving an IT team granting or rescinding access rights for a specific user.
A well-framed IAM program can reduce the points of failure in your security architecture and protect your corporate assets from internal and external threats. It can also increase productivity by enabling employees to work with the same tools they need without remembering multiple logins and passwords. And it can help you meet compliance requirements amid a landscape of increasingly stringent data and privacy regulations.
How IAM Works
IAM identifies, authenticates, and authorizes individuals to access a company’s IT systems, data, applications, or other resources. It also enables employees to work efficiently by giving them access to the tools they need to do their jobs without worrying about whether those tools present a security risk or are being misused.
IAM typically involves a centralized technology that replaces or profoundly integrates with existing access and single sign-on (SSO) tools. It uses a database of users and pre-defined job roles to manage who gets access to what IT resources.
During the IAM implementation process, it’s essential to set a clear strategy for how your organization will use its new IAM tool. This can include defining the individual identities to be managed, assigning those identities roles, and establishing the permissions granted to each part. It’s also crucial to ensure that your IAM solution supports zero trust and identity-based access policies.
Zero trust policies require that your IAM system confirm the identity of each person who logs in. This may involve multiple factors, such as MFA or adaptive authentication, that check a user’s location, device, time of day, and other attributes to make sure they are who they say they are. An IAM system can also prevent users from accessing certain IT resources by limiting their permissions to specific designs, databases, or information based on context.
Benefits of IAM
When a business implements IAM, it gets many benefits beyond its primary function. Among these are security, efficiency, and convenience for employees and customers.
IAM can provide granular access control for every aspect of a company’s IT infrastructure, including data, applications, and devices. This helps businesses meet compliance requirements with stringent data and privacy regulations. With IAM, businesses can easily set up authentication protocols based on an employee’s attributes, such as their department or job role. This way, only people with the appropriate roles or responsibilities can access sensitive information. This will help prevent internal attacks and keep hackers from getting into a system by exploiting weak points such as an employee’s password or phishing scams.
Using IAM also allows organizations to establish a zero-trust policy. This ensures that every external application an employee uses is vetted. This will keep threats and malware from entering a network and stop data breaches before they occur.
Finally, IAM can offer all users a seamless sign-in and login experience. This will allow your employees and customers to access your products and services without remembering multiple usernames or passwords. This will save time and effort for both parties and increase productivity. Furthermore, it can make managing and monitoring user activity easier, so you will always know who is in or out of the system.
Conclusions
Identity Access Management (IAM) ensures that the right people have the correct data at the right time. This can help to keep your business safe from hackers and insider threats, and it can also help to ensure regulatory compliance. IAM works hand-in-hand with identity management, which is focused on authentication. Once a user has been authenticated, IAM processes can evaluate their attributes and decide whether or not they should have access to systems. In addition, IAM also helps with the process of offboarding users. This is essential to data security because it ensures all access to resources is revoked on time. Otherwise, privileged accounts may remain dormant for too long, creating security vulnerabilities. IAM helps to mitigate this risk by managing the entire lifecycle of a privileged account.