Optimising your Identity and Access Management Strategy: What you Should Know
Cybersecurity professionals know that although malware can seriously damage any enterprise, identity is where the true digital danger lies. Hackers who possess the credentials of your employee can leak proprietary or consumer data, siphon funds, and disrupt essential business processes. Thus, optimising your identity and access management techniques and processes is essential. Below are some tips you can consider:
Ditch Your Legacy IAM Solution
Maintaining older identity and access management systems can be expensive. In fact, they may be inadequate to face today’s identity threats. Too many IAM solutions can lead to integration problems that allow more threats to slip past your security policies. To optimise your privileged account management and IAM strategies, you must re-evaluate the IAM solutions your business uses. Assess whether they protect you and your employees and then eliminate or update older solutions.
Optimise your IAM Workflow
An IAM workflow is any series of operations your company enacts to manage identities across your network. Such operations might include onboarding, provisioning, and terminating identities. IAM workflows can be best optimised by deciding on how you define optimisation in terms of identity and access management. Workflow automation might be the perfect call if your organisation needs greater efficiency and accuracy in its workflows.
Embrace Two-Factor Authentication
When optimising your IAM strategy, let your employees retrieve their passwords automatically to give your helpdesk time to breathe. It is then, best practice to deploy a two-factor authentication solution to guarantee the validity of employees’ reset requests. Hard token systems might be helpful in ensuring hackers don’t pose as employees to steal their credentials.
Educate and Train your Staff
Keep in mind that your employees are your biggest attack vector. If these people treat their credentials ignorantly, your optimisation efforts will go down the drain. Thus, you must educate them to recognise phishing campaigns, create strong passwords, and use two-factor or multifactor authentication if you want to optimise your IAM strategy. More importantly, involve your employees in protecting your business data. This can be done by making IAM best practices as part of their regular employee reviews. Also, you can incentivise good digital hygiene by rewarding those who can catch a forwarded spearphishing email and alert the cybersecurity team.
As a company owner, you must ensure the end-experience is not so complicated as to turn off your own people. You can only enforce measures and make employees follow your policies if they are not confusing. Survey your workers to know where the IAM policies of your organisation might be causing undue stress.
