Mitigating access-related risks is increasingly challenging in today’s complex business environment. The chaos that results from supporting countless devices, applications, and systems with access to key data is harder to manage than ever before. Many organizations today lack the resources of larger, global enterprises, yet face the same security and compliance demands.

Security teams find themselves struggling to keep up with the increasing demands of the business, with industry mandates, and with regulatory compliance. Manual provisioning processes, insufficient visibility into access levels across the organization, and a lack of automation with no centralized processes frequently leads to overprovisioning, rubber stamping, excessive distribution of access, orphaned accounts, and increased risks, including insider threats, across the business.

Companies need a way to see through all this noise, and to intelligently and efficiently mitigate the identity risks their companies encounter every day. So what is the best approach for addressing these challenges and managing access risks in your organization? Let’s examine three key strategies that will empower your organization to manage identity-related risks so they don’t manage you:

1) Cleanse, Refine, and Improve Your Environment with Intelligent Analytics

Managing identity chaos and mitigating access risks should begin by leveraging intelligence to understand what risks are most pressing in your organization. In fact, the success of an IGA program can be greatly improved through analytics that  increase visibility and insight into its environment. During the recent Identity & Access Management Summit, Gartner indicated that by 2022, identity governance and administration implementations that begin with cleanup analytics will demonstrate twice the ROI as those programs that don’t. That’s an incredible return for those organizations willing to put in the hard work of ‘getting their house in order’ by using analytics to inform their identity governance processes.  

With solutions like Access Insight that leverage intelligent identity analytics to help identify risk and policy violations, an organization can put a plan in place to effectively begin this critical cleanup. This is applicable not only to the risk that is easy to identify, but access risk that is hidden from direct view, or inherited in a complex environment. This cleanup will set the stage to address immediate threats, improve ongoing provisioning, and enhance governance across the enterprise.

To make things easier and more accurate, the Visual Identity Suite provides an intelligent, visual-first approach to role creation and access certification, helping organizations to assess and refine their role-based environments and more effectively mitigate risks across their environments. Leveraging identity analytics for actionable information and insights ultimately empowers intelligence-enabled data in your organization to improve and enhance decision making for the long-term.

2) Simplify the Complexity of Access Management

Providing the right access to users in a timely, reliable manner in accordance with company policy is a major challenge to organizations today. Managers or application owners often find themselves automatically approving access requests or just copying access from an existing user because of the extensive time and resources required to review manual requests. Using paper forms, emails or tickets results in an inconsistent method for creating accounts and does not ensure proper access is approved using the right channels.   

Mitigating identity and access management risks requires an innovative, automated solution that makes the process of user access requests and approvals easy to complete and adopt across your business. This means leveraging a single portal for reviewing access requests, providing approvals, and managing user privileges. Core Access provides an intelligent and highly efficient solution that ensures users get the access they need—and only what they need—all from a centralized system.

Using built-in intelligence to model the required access based on user analytics, our identity management system provides the ability to use entitlements in addition to roles. Plus information is presented in a context that makes it less likely errors will be made. This reduces the complexity of managing identities, ensures consistency for account creation that aligns with your processes and protocols, and adheres to the principle of least privilege access.

3) Quickly Visualize What Access Looks Like in Your Business

To intelligently mitigate identity risk and manage identity chaos, your organization also needs to quickly visualize what access looks like within your business. IT departments today often manage more than 75 application environments, so there is an explosion of information, users, entitlements, and access relationships, resulting in limited visibility into who actually has access into what systems, not simply who should or is approved to have access. Many organizations have tried to manage access through lists or electronic portals, but these are not reliable or effective long-term solutions. Approval and review processes are still overwhelming without context of what access is really needed or around what each entitlement really means.

Instead, leveraging a strategic, role-based access policy improves and enhances the way organizations approach identity governance. Think of a role as a collection of access privileges typically defined around a job title or job function. Using roles, organizations have solid, predefined, and preapproved access policies in place, and know specifically which access privileges each person needs. This enables your organization to quickly see common user entitlements and rapidly identify outliers. And with the ability to actually see role design, observational studies from Core Security have shown that accuracy is improved twice as much and time spent reviewing is reduced by 50 percent. This is because the process is quick and user friendly, so it’s easy to see what people actually have access to and what access may be an outlier.

Embracing a role-based approach simplifies identity governance and administration, and aids your business particularly as it grows and changes. As part of the Visual Identity Suite, Core Role Designer shows logical groupings of users and entitlements that give you the intelligence, power, and control to create the right roles for your organization. This enables you to focus on role definitions and role assignments rather than individual accounts, decreasing access risks and bolstering your organizational security.

The Impact of Mitigating Identity Chaos with a Best Practice Approach

Core Security offers the most intelligent and efficient path to managing identity chaos, and mitigating identity and access risk. With innovative solutions and expertise that empower organizations to build more intelligent, efficient, and impactful identity governance and access management programs, we can support your company in reducing its most critical access-related risks. We enable companies of all sizes and resource levels to refine and cleanse their environments with intelligent analytics, quickly visualize what access looks like in their business, empower intelligence-enabled data to enhance decision making, and decrease the most pressing identity risks, fast. Because doing more with less is an essential part of keeping up with the challenges of identity governance—no matter what form it takes.