SBN

Digital Identity – It’s just business as usual

The increased demand for secure remote access poses a serious risk; businesses must meet the growing needs of a user base with multiple devices and from various locations to access numerous applications. As your teams “seamlessly” shift from working in the office to working from home, it’s easy to overlook the importance of identity.

Identity is a representation of an individual, entity, or device and the associated access rights. The increased usage of personal devices for work increased adoption of mobile devices for work, and the increased skillfulness of hackers, who can gain unauthorized access to sites for stealing sensitive data, are some of the reasons to better manage your users’ identities. The increased demand for secure access poses a serious challenge to the IT team. Proactively managing identity enables a secure and connected organization.

Identity & Access Management

Identity & Access Management (IAM) facilitates your users’ access to authorized technology resources at the right time. To take it a bit further, IAM is the combination of identification, authentication, and authorization. Identification of your identity – it’s whom you claim to be when you say, “I’m Jane Smith.” Authentication is how you prove who you say you are, typically through a password. If your organization uses two-factor authentication, you may also have to provide something you have, such as a one-time pin via an app on your phone. Authorization, once you’ve been identified and authenticated, determines what you can do in the application.

Drivers for Identity Management

Businesses must balance enabling user-access applications and tools while protecting sensitive information from breaches AND maintaining regulatory requirements. Your users have moved beyond the protection of firewalls and physical barriers to conducting business where they are. Your customers are interacting and engaging with your business through various channels in innovative new ways increasing exposure to hackers. To keep up with the modern threat landscape, a new security paradigm is needed, one that puts identity at the center. The benefits of a strong identity and access management program are considerable:

  • Centralized Access Control: Manage users from a consolidated view of access data; centralize policies for right access privileges to keep users productive
  • Compliance: Data access governance continues to grow in complexity and enforcement. An identity access management solution provides control over who can access data, how the data can be used and shared, and the enforcement of user consent.
  • Cost Reductions: Significant labor costs keep your business secure; standardize and automate the managing of identities, authentication and authorization can provide time and money savings while reducing risk to the business

Solutions

A good identity management program enables collaboration and breaks down barriers to share information and work safely together across company boundaries. The users might be customers, employees, or vendors. An IAM solution provides administrators with the power to change a user’s role, track user activities, create reports on those activities, and enforce policies on an ongoing basis. Information security is critical, but it is more than just keeping information secret. An IAM solution for your employees needs to be productive and secure to provide access to required applications from anywhere. For your customers, the ability to support an omnichannel experience continuously can improve customer experience. Finally, grow with your partners, providing access to sensitive information and applications to enable quick and secure access.

Are you confident in the security of your digital identity?

Let’s schedule a call to discuss your company’s cybersecurity plan.


*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Datcher Group Inc authored by socialdgi. Read the original post at: http://datchergroup.com/digital-identity-its-just-business-as-usual/