As businesses use more applications than ever to transform digitally, identity governance becomes critical to security. Administration involves implementing internal policies to ensure compliance.
Centralizing these processes can make them easier to manage, secure and upgrade. It can also save time and reduce costs. Our post covers the ‘Four A’s’ of cloud identity management: authorization, authentication, access control, and auditing.
Authorization
Cloud IAM provides authorization capabilities to protect data and control access. This is crucial for compliance and governance, especially in the cloud. Misconfigured cloud servers, account hijacking and lateral movement from one application to another are common security incidents affecting organizations.
Cloud identity governance solutions provide powerful protection against these issues by automatically analyzing and reducing risk for entitlements across all your cloud infrastructure. These solutions federate with your user stores (usually LDAP or AD) and connect to on-premises directories to integrate with existing provisioning systems. They can also support joiner, mover and leaver workflows to reflect changes in the right permission sets for all your users.
Traditional methods for identifying and eliminating risky entitlements fall short in the multi-cloud environment where user and service identities can be spread out among thousands of permission sets. Companies like Tools4Ever offer a single, multicolored identity governance solution that eliminates the complexity and friction of managing identity, permissions and risks by automating the process, delivering actionable insights and providing automated risk remediation through workflows.
Authentication
Authentication is the first step to securing your organization’s cloud infrastructure. From customers looking for a seamless login experience on e-commerce websites to employees using multiple applications throughout the day, IAM solutions help verify identities and provide streamlined access.
IAM systems must also handle privileged accounts with permissions to manage data centers, servers and databases. These digital identities need special protection because theft can allow cybercriminals to do everything they want in a system, including exfiltrating sensitive information. IAM tools like credential vaults and just-in-time access protocols protect privileged identities and reduce the risk of breaches.
IAM tools are designed to follow the principle of least privilege, which ensures only those who need access to enterprise resources can get it. A full picture of all entitlements must be available to security teams to achieve this. The identity governance platform works to reveal gaps between desired enterprise policy and actual entitlements, allowing security teams to keep up with the dynamic nature of the cloud.
Access Control
Access control ensures that only authorized users can access a company’s data. That includes human users (customers, employees, contractors) and non-humans like IoT devices and automated systems. IAM solutions enable companies to assign a digital identity to each of these entities and then grant them permissions to specific resources on the network.
These permissions can be grouped into job functions or data access privilege categories and assigned to individual users. This is commonly called role-based access control, or RBAC.
A cloud IAM solution can help manage this process by facilitating user provisioning, de-provisioning and access rights modification. It can also flexibly collect existing identities and associated roles for faster onboarding and deliver actionable intelligence to identify high-risk entitlements. It can automatically certify these roles to reduce risk and accelerate compliance processes. It can also continuously scan the business to identify and remediate policies that impact the segregation of duties.
Auditing
Typically, IAM solutions manage a company’s user account lifecycle, including entitlement and provisioning. They also control unified access policies, often with single sign-on (SSO) and multifactor authentication enablement. They can also provide directory services to centralize and synchronize user accounts.
IAM systems allow you to assign a digital identity and set access privileges for users and non-users. This means only authorized people can access and alter your company’s data and infrastructure and can’t do more than the policy allows.
However, there are plenty of ways hackers could break into your network. To prevent those vulnerabilities, having full visibility into your access risk is critical.
