Be Secure. Be Compliant: Why Access Management Alone is Not Enough

Today, many organizations are relying on identity tools designed to quickly authenticate and federate access to workers. While these tools often offer basic lifecycle management capabilities to enable workers with 24/7 access, they lack the needed security access controls and policies required to effectively know who can access what and more importantly deliver access based on who should access what. Unknowingly these organizations are perpetuating their risk exposure by doling out access without governance oversight and enforcement.

These access risks can only be addressed by identity security that puts proper access controls in place to mitigate the risk of toxic access combinations, updates worker access as their job role/status changes and continuously monitors for access risk.

Prevent Access Management Blind Spots and Over Provisioning

By implementing an end-to-end identity program that integrates access management capabilities, such as SSO and MFA, with the lifecycle management and governance of identity security, organizations can secure their environment while also benefitting from the efficiency of an integrated strategy.

Liken this to the analogy of an office building and its security setup. To enter the building, you’re required to present ID that proves you are who you say you are in order to be allowed in — this is access management authentication. But letting you in should also mean controlling where you can go and what you can access (which floors, which rooms, which systems), since employees, guests, contractors, and vendors all need different levels of access. This is what identity security does: Putting policies in place to properly manage ALL user access, ensuring every worker has the precise amount needed to do their job. No more, no less. Without it, organizations have a false sense of security and may find themselves exposed.

A lifecycle management tool not equipped with identity security controls can quickly lead to over-provisioning (giving access to those who shouldn’t have it) as well as compliance issues (failing to secure and protect critical data). But the biggest danger is what can result if accounts are compromised or are the target of insider or external threats: catastrophic data breaches and costly compliance violations.

Using the power of SailPoint Identity Security, organizations can enable complete end-to-end identity management by unifying access management with AI-driven identity security to effectively authenticate, provision, and govern access to all applications and data across the enterprise.

The result is an identity-aware organization that is more efficient, secure and compliant.

An identity-aware infrastructure is essential for today’s enterprise that must proactively address security risks and compliance needs while still effectively meeting the strategic goals of the business.

By leveraging the SailPoint Identity Platform and the power of AI and machine learning (ML), organizations benefit from unmatched visibility and intelligence while automating and accelerating the management of all user identities, entitlements, systems, data and cloud services – including the ability to manage and secure cloud IaaS environments like AWS and Azure.

Realizing the Power of Identity Security

Identity security helps protect businesses from the inherent risk that comes with providing technology access across today’s varied and remote workforce. Some of the key benefits of SailPoint Identity Security include the ability to:

• Gain a 360º view of all user types and their related access – including all permissions, entitlements, attributes, and roles.
• Automatically provision, adjust, and terminate access as workers join, change roles, or leave the organization.
• Identify risky behavior and stop it fast using AI-driven insights and recommendations to help know when it’s safe to grant access or not.
• Enforce user access policies, such as separation-of-duty (SoD), and establish consistent controls, eliminating access violations or over-entitled users.
• Track usage and continuously monitor the efficacy of access controls for apps, data and cloud to ensure permissions comply with policy.
• Reduce overall IT costs and eliminate calls to the helpdesk by automating identity processes such as onboarding, password resets and access requests.
• Discover and protect sensitive data, including cloud file stores, ensuring users have the right level of access.
• Adjust access controls and policies as your business evolves and threats surface with adaptive governance

Build Your Identity Security Strategy

Organizations must consider the big picture and take a more strategic approach to managing their identities and building cyber resilience. An identity program includes much more than just access – which is the tip of the iceberg. What resides under the surface is identity context that is gained by an identity security program. This rich context is used to enable smarter identity management by sharing with other critical IT and security resources in the IT ecosystem. When a smart identity approach is used, organizations quickly see it is so much more than application governance and provisioning, lifecycle management, certification, and password management; it is the connective fabric that weaves all your security and compliance efforts together.

If you are not able to answer these questions while planning or contemplating your identity strategy, identity security can help:

1. Do you have full visibility and control over and into all types of users and to all apps (both on-prem and cloud), files, and cloud platforms within your organization?
2. Do your employees get only the right access for the right resources at the right time? Are these controls automated?
3. Can you take the burden off IT by identifying repetitive, low-risk tasks that can be safely automated using AI-based recommendations?
4. Do you know what your users are doing with their access to your organization’s resources?
5. Can you automatically modify or terminate access based on your users’ changing roles?
6. Can you automatically produce a report for your auditors and be in a continuous state of compliance?
7. Can you flag suspicious activity and alert the appropriate administrators?

Enable user access and protect your business everywhere with SailPoint Identity Security for the Cloud Enterprise. Learn more.