Skip to Main Content

Helping IT and Security Leaders Sleep Better at Night

In highly regulated industries, the concept of “governance” isn’t new.  In fact, governance (and governance policy creation) is something that can benefit organizations of all sizes across any industry.  Why is that?  Governance allows organizations to establish a set of rules that bring order to the way business is performed.  Without enforced rules, you could end up with an organization that looks like the wild west – which can lead to many sleepless nights especially for those who have stewardship over security and compliance.

The good news is that governance helps leaders sleep better at night, knowing their teams are performing their daily responsibilities in compliance with federal, institutional, or industry regulations.  When it comes to managing identities, governance means making sure the right people have the right access to right applications, systems, and data to do their jobs successfully. This is accomplished by defining and establishing access policies that are enforced across the organization.

The truth is, most organizations are acutely aware of the regulatory policies they must comply with (be it PCI, SOX, FedRAMP or any one of a growing list of industry-specific guidelines). In addition to these, what about an organization’s security and identity program policies? Should every individual have a manager?  Should contractors have privileged access to production systems?

One of the primary types of governance policies that organizations leverage to address those questions, are separation-of-duties (SoD) policies. Separation-of-duties policies act, as their name implies, as a way to separate potentially conflicting permissions for the purpose of reducing the risk of fraud or compliance violations.

Organizations that embrace the use of separation-of-duties policies, operate with far greater confidence when these appropriate checks and balances are implemented, improving security while easing audit compliance.

However, even with the value of ‘policy-driven’ governance so clear, many organizations still struggle to leverage policies as a strategic investment. Instead, these policies become a tactical burden for their IT teams to manage. In trying to understand why, we’ve found that many organizations are using the wrong tool for the job.  Manual processes built around spreadsheets and email are subject to human error or possible malintent and are not designed for speed, ease of management, or flexibility of implementation. Combine this with the increasing number of cloud-based applications, implementing a comprehensive SOD program becomes a daunting challenge.

Instead, organizations need intuitive policy management capabilities that place all foundational governance dimensions at their fingertips and allow governance to become a business enabler.  Imagine a solution where policy builders can view all IT system access, user roles, and user descriptors (e.g., contractors, department, job function), and then bring that information into the creation of separation-of-duties policies within a few simple clicks.

Powered by the IdentityNow Dynamic Discovery Engine, SailPoint is making policy creation reachable and easily enforceable for IT and security teams of all skill levels. Through an intuitive search-driven policy management experience, we’re allowing organizations to create comprehensive and precise separation-of-duties policies with speed and confidence.  Our SoD policy management capabilities allow for visibility and control over the enforcement of each policy, thus ensuring consistent and continuous compliance.

IdentityNow is reimagining policy management and ensuring that more organizations have access to the benefits of proper governance. Compliance and risk management challenges have kept IT and security professionals awake at night for too long. It’s finally time to put adequate governance in place, relax, and get some sleep at night.

Want to see it in action? Watch how IdentityNow gets you to SoD in two minutes. 

separation of duty


Discussion