Why does your business need IAM?

 

Identity and Access Management are the solutions to manage a company's IT permissions for the employees, contractors, and customers. IAM solutions are an effective instrument to enforce security policies (especially in the perspective crowing cyber threats and complex law regulations) and reduce efforts of the IT department. So, what is IAM? Why do you need IAM? What benefits can it bring to you?

IAM definition

IAM is a framework of software products, technologies and best practice use cases that perform the tasks of managing the lifecycle of user accounts and access of the IT systems in your company.

Imagine that a new employee starts in your company, who naturally must have access to all necessary resources, at least corporate e-mail, and his departments data store. E-Mail is usually standardized for all employees and is necessary for registration in other systems. Moreover, the employees accounts need to be secured by passwords, MFA and a secure process for password recovery.

Some systems must be synchronized with the new employees account information, for example HR and finance. The system administrator is responsible for that, but if it is not clear whether an employee should have access to certain resources the need for approval arises. If access is no longer needed, the employee may not ask to "return" it and over the years have cumulated access to various systems in your company. (Think about interns working in different departments during their internship). Also, people can change position, name, phone number, and responsibilities, or their contract might end, all of this are tasks which an IAM solution could help you with.

These are all examples of tasks that a system administrator faces daily, binding up valuable time in standardized, repetitive processes.  IAM allows you to efficiently simply by automating these processes. With IAM, anyone can request a role for the new employee. Based on the criticality, IAM decides if the role can be assigned directly or if someone needs to approve the request. In this case, the approver (e.g., the employee's manager) is informed and the request is presented to the approver with the correct information to make a educated decision.

Advantages of IAM

1. Savings of time and expenses for your IT department. IAM helps to automate the processes of on- and offboarding employees to your IT resources, consolidating permissions from various systems into meaningful roles and enforcing your company's security policies. With an IAM solution, you transform the permissions-based flood of emails, tasks, and service requests into a centralized self-service. You only need to maintain the IAM platform that takes care of permissions across all your resources. This means you save costs on inefficient processes.
2. Convenient user experience. Users have less to do with access to their working space and be fully prepared to start.  It leads to another problem-solving area – controlled access. IAM will help you to enforce your company's password policies across all resources, it will also assist you with providing multi factor authentication. For the employee, IAM can assist in providing a password reset platform that allows the reset in any IT resource.
3. Increased security. The main idea is to provide the right access to the right person in a secure way. It excludes such potentially dangerous actions as fraud, data leakage, and non-compliance. It is safe to prevent violation of the informational security which leads to reputation damage and refunds to the clients (for which data security can be a priority and strategic element while choosing a company).
4. Simplicity and flexibility. You have easy control thanks to secure repository responsible for the permissions in you company. IAM processes are designed break down complex processes into easy procedures to setup up user accounts. IAM is engineered to prevent errors and misuse of authority. Managers can easily review and change the access of their employees. Flexibility is gained by automatization and connection between roles, positions, and hierarchy inside the company.
5. All data will be automatically documented. Alle All changes made to the records and decisions made during an approval in the IAM system are saved. For each change and decision, you can check who made it and when. In the context of the related records, even the why is pointed out clearly. You can restore the state of any record from a specific date. It helps quality and process control. The main problem with documentation is usually the time needed, but in the IAM system this is done automatically.

To sum up, with IAM you will help your business to save time and expenses, secure and document the permissions to your it resources, and make work for management and employees more convenient, simple, and flexible.