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CyberArk Privilege Cloud: Protect your Privileged Accounts with a SaaS Solution

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On premise or in the cloud, privileged accounts are one of the biggest security vulnerabilities facing organizations today. Scattered throughout information systems (IS), privileged accounts provide access to your company’s most critical resources. A large majority of organizations use hybrid architectures, mixing applications and services hosted locally and remotely. In this complex and disparate context, how can the security of your most sensitive assets be guaranteed?

Whether you are the Director of Information Systems, the Information System Security Manager or a line or application manager, extreme vigilance is required. The implementation of a zero-trust approach should be considered, and the deployment of a privileged account management policy that uses efficient solutions adapted to new practices, such as remote offices, should be a priority.

Named a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant 2022 for Access Management and Privileged Access Management, CyberArk is a leading provider of identity and access management solutions and is recognized for its expertise in privileged account management.

This internationally renowned software company develops products that enable companies and organizations to deploy a PAM program to secure their privileged accounts. Among them is CyberArk Privilege Cloud, the Software as a Service (SaaS) alternative to their flagship offering, CyberArk Privileged Access Manager (CyberArk PAM).

This article will share its features and functionalities in addition to their benefits and overall potential.

Why should you use CyberArk Privilege Cloud to manage your privileged accounts?

CyberArk Privilege Cloud: What is it?

Like CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, CyberArk Privilege Cloud is a solution that secures critical assets as well as machine and human identities within organizations. Whether local, cloud or hybrid, CyberArk Privilege Cloud protects all your infrastructures. You can secure, manage, control and monitor all activities associated with privileged accounts in addition to all types of identities in your information systems.

With CyberArk Privilege Cloud, you can:
• Manage and protect your organization’s privileged accounts and Secure Socket Shell (SSH) keys.
• Control the access granted to privileged accounts.
• Create and track user activity related to privileged accounts to which they have access.
• Identify all credentials that allow access to your organization’s applications, services and resources.
• Comply with audit and regulatory requirements as well as security and compliance policies within your organization.
• Deploy simplified, centralized management of privileged accounts.

Case Studies: in what situations can CyberArk Privilege Cloud help you achieve your goals?

There is a plethora of situations where the use of a PAM solution is helpful or even essential. Here are two of the most common situations we encounter with our customers.

Access accounts to sensitive company resources must be secured.

You have mission-critical applications and want to ensure that the accounts that can administer the servers that host them and the databases they rely on are not compromised.

With CyberArk Privilege Cloud, you can enable automatic password rotation by enabling Central Policy Manager (CPM) to protect these accounts. In this way, the user has no choice but to go through the CyberArk vault to use them, as the password is automatically renewed on a regular basis after each use. Furthermore, the recording of user activity (logs, videos) allows you to point out any unusual or even suspicious behavior and monitor the use of privileged accounts to anticipate associated risks.

External providers have access to privileged access accounts.

Do any of your contractors have access to mission-critical applications and servers on a temporary basis? Ensure that their access is revoked in a timely manner by enabling the many Zero Trust features available through CyberArk Privilege Cloud. You can use approval workflows that allow you to grant access only for the duration of your contractor’s assignment.

CyberArk Privilege Cloud and CyberArk PAM: What are the stakes?

Like many organizations, you want to reduce the risks and threats to your privileged accounts without impacting the productivity of your staff. To meet this challenge, CyberArk has designed CyberArk Privilege Cloud, a fast and easy-to-implement SaaS offering available in the cloud.

Like CyberArk Privileged Access Manager (CyberArk PAM) which is available on premise, it allows you to:
• Defend your organization against attacks by logging privileged identities in a secure, dedicated repository.
• Adhere to the compliance constraints and recommendations to which your organization is subjected and respond to auditors by producing a centralized audit, all while considering internal requirements.
• Facilitate and streamline the digital activity of your teams. Users are securely authenticated through a single web portal without the need for a VPN.

CyberArk Privilege Cloud: What features are available?

CyberArk Privilege Cloud gives you access to a wide set of features, including:

Managing privileged credentials

Identify and integrate all privileged credentials and secrets used in the solution for centralized management. Enable solution administrators to deploy dedicated password security policies and automate password rotation.

Isolation and supervision of user sessions

Monitor and record user sessions and securely keep records and associated audits to meet the compliance requirements of your organization.

Threat detection and treatment

Identify privileged accounts and credentials to embed in your PAM program and automate their integration. Identify abnormal behavior and potentially compromised activity for remediation.

Managing mobile devices

Enforce your organization’s security policies for all end points – including those that are not permanently connected to the system – and trigger the renewal of associated credentials and accounts.

Remote access to CyberArk Privilege Cloud

Enable employees and external contractors to securely access CyberArk Privilege Cloud from any location without using a VPN, agent or password.

Adaptive MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) and SSO (Single Sign-On)

Secure access to company resources with single sign-on and multi-factor authentication.

CyberArk Privilege Cloud: What specific features are related to SaaS?

The Benefits of SaaS for PAM

Today, more and more organizations are moving to the cloud and to SaaS products, provided their security and compliance policies allow it. This paradigm shift has many benefits, including the speed of implementation and the deployment of products, services and applications.

As such, CyberArk Privilege Cloud has advantages associated with SaaS and allows its users to:
• Automate upgrades and patches, reducing total cost of ownership and making the latest product versions immediately available.
• Have secure services in compliance with SOC 2 and a certified Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 99.95% for availability. The product remains fully managed by CyberArk, its publisher.

In addition, CyberArk supports organizations moving to SaaS by providing the CyberArk Jump Start, a practical kit used to deploy CyberArk Privilege Cloud easily and in three phases, helping users to better understand their approach to SaaS with regards to their needs.

CyberArk Workforce Identity: Identity Rights Management Applied to CyberArk Privilege Cloud

How can you be sure that your teams will be able to access CyberArk Privilege Cloud in a simple and secure way, in compliance with your organization’s security and compliance policies, and without generating new risk related to user access granted to CyberArk Privilege Cloud?

By choosing CyberArk Privilege Cloud, you leverage the full potential of the CyberArk Workforce Identity solution for the administration and governance of digital identities. In concrete terms, this means that:

• Teams have secure access to all resources and applications in your organization’s environment hosted in the cloud (in addition to CyberArk Privilege Cloud).
• The accesses granted to identities are equipped with multi-factor authentication (MFA). This applies both to identities and to the terminals used to access applications, services and resources.
• People with on-premise application access will be able to use the same tool and will not require a VPN to access locally-hosted resources.
• The Artificial Intelligence (AI) built into CyberArk Workforce Identity can analyze user behavior to detect a potentially suspicious situation.
• End-user activity within web applications is recorded, audited and protected.
• Credentials for business applications that require the use of a password or critical data are secured.

With CyberArk Workforce Security, access and identity management to cloud-hosted applications and resources is controlled so that the operation of remote applications does not introduce new risks associated with access rights.

CyberArk Privilege Cloud vs. CyberArk PAM: How to choose between the two?

Now that you have a more detailed overview of the range of possibilities available to you by using one of these two solutions, how do you decide? In which case should you use CyberArk Privilege Cloud? What are the indicators that would lead you to choose CyberArk PAM, its on-premise counterpart?

CyberArk BluePrint is here to help. Designed to support you at every stage of building and deploying your PAM program, this service offering from CyberArk allows you to make the right choice based on best practices proven by their experts.

CyberArk Privilege Cloud together with privileged account governance is the winning combination.

CyberArk Privilege Cloud has a lot to offer when it comes to managing privileged accounts. Using such a comprehensive PAM solution to protect your privileged accounts and access is more than recommended: it is a must.

But don’t stop there. To ensure the highest level of security for your company’s most critical resources and maximize the potential of CyberArk Privilege Cloud, it is a good practice to implement privileged account governance.

Privileged Account Governance: What are the issues?

CyberArk Privilege Cloud and PAM solutions allow you to protect your organization’s privileged accounts through:
• Centralized management of privileged accounts.
• Control of the life cycle of assigned privileged access.
• The reinforcement of the security of these accounts by identifying the users who access them.
• The traceability of each of the actions performed by the users having access to the PAM solution.

However, how can you :
• make sure the right people have access to the right privileged accounts?
• continuously control end-to-end access chains as organizational and technical changes occur in your company?
• allow vault owners to regularly verify the legitimacy of the privileged accesses that have been granted?

The implementation of governance of your privileged accounts in addition to the operation of a PAM solution is essential in meeting these security and compliance challenges.

Privileged Account Governance: What are the benefits?

There are many benefits to implementing privileged account governance. Here are the five benefits we have identified.

#1- Audit regularly and easily your PAM solution.

Identify all the administrators and users of your PAM solution and verify who has access to what to better secure your resources through the auditing of your PAM solution.

The ability to audit your PAM solution allows you to ensure that password rotation and access segregation are effective and that costs are reduced by optimizing license usage. You can also track and identify changes in the organization and understand their impact on access to your PAM solution.

#2 – Control ITGCs and optimize data quality.

Ensure that your ITGCs are properly executed and monitor the activity of at-risk identities while maintaining the highest level of data quality within your account repositories (Active Directory (AD)). This will help you stay ahead of administrative errors and enhance the performance of your PAM solution.

#3 – Ensure compliance by automating access review.

Implement safe access review campaigns by safe managers to ensure and demonstrate CyberArk Privilege Cloud access compliance, correct anomalies and mitigate the risk of access misconfiguration.

#4 – Expand the scope of CyberArk Privilege Cloud.

Easily and quickly detect privileged accounts within your systems. With governance, you can correlate data from multiple sources (HR IS, AD, PAM, CMDB, logs, etc.) and ensure that identity lifecycle management is under control.

#5 – Adhere to your organization’s security policies.

To do this, set up a control plan that will allow you to continuously report anomalies to ensure that the security policies in place are being respected. This can be done by answering the following questions:
• Is a safe administrator also able to use secrets, thus accumulating incompatible rights?
• Do contractors retain active access rights to privileged accounts even though they no longer work with the company?
• Are there any dormant or unauthorized accounts to disable?

Protecting your privileged accounts is a critical issue that requires a combined approach.

To secure your sensitive assets and protect yourself from a potential attack on your organization’s privileged accounts, a PAM solution is a must. CyberArk Privilege Cloud, the leading product in the PAM market, can help you address many of your privileged account issues.

However, while the adoption of a privileged account management solution is essential, it must be accompanied by the implementation of privileged account governance to ensure the highest level of security.

 

Need help securing your privileged accounts?
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What Is A User Access Review?

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Organizations evolve every single day. Some of the changes include the departure of an employee, the arrival of a new colleague, the implementation of an innovative application, and the launch of a project involving external service providers. Each event impacts the daily activities of an organization.

Whether minimal or structural, each of these changes has direct repercussions on the organization’s information systems (IS) which, in turn, can generate discrepancies and security flaws.

Employee access rights are no exception to this rule. Because they give access to data, applications and infrastructure, they must be a main focus of the company to both guarantee the protection of resources as well as the adherence to the regulatory compliance constraints to which every organization is now subject.  The user access review, or the control and monitoring of authorizations and permissions, contributes greatly to addressing this dual challenge of security and compliance. In order to carry out the review as efficiently as possible, the application of certain best practices, is essential and, for most, indispensable.

But for now, let’s go back to basics. This article will highlight the key points to consider when doing this crucial exercise, such as the definition of the user access review, associated issues and challenges, and existing campaign structures.

What is a user access review?

The user access review, a standard for securing logical access rights

The user access review is an integral part of any organization’s Identity and Access Management (IAM) strategy. It is an essential control function that many companies rely on to secure logical access rights.  Such is the case for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) document NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5, including the definition of the AC-2 control that mentions the need to “review accounts for compliance with account management requirements.” Additionally, NIST CSF PR.AC-4 states that “access permissions are managed, incorporating the principles of least privilege and separation of duties.”

In concrete terms, what is the purpose of the user access review?

Reviewing authorizations and permissions is a process that ensures that all granted user access rights giving access to an organization’s information systems (IS) are appropriate and legitimate. The review precisely pinpoints:

  • Who has access to what within the organization?
  • What level of access each user has?
  • Which access rights are authorized and approved?
  • Which access rights are not?

The user access review applies to all existing access rights to data, applications and infrastructure) within a company, whether or not they have been granted to contractors, partners, interns, employees, managers or executives.

What are the challenges associated with the user access review?

The review of authorizations is an essential exercise to help a company control its access rights while addressing security, compliance and associated governance issues. These are some of the issues that we will discuss here.

#1: Security of assets through the detection of the risks associated with user access

The user access review ensures that each user has the access rights strictly necessary and sufficient to carry out his or her job functions. It is a fundamental aspect of corporate information security. An effective review establishes a list of all errors associated with the assignment of access rights and makes it possible to detect risky situations. Based on this, corrective actions can be taken and security breaches avoided, alleviating the threat of fraud or information leakage.

What’s more, the review exercise contributes to compliance with three core principles considered to be good cybersecurity practices in risk management and internal control:

  • The principle of least privilege
  • The principle of need-to-know
  • The separation of duties
#2: Adherence to the regulatory constraints to which a company is subject

In the 2000’s, the financial sector saw the emergence of a number of regulatory constraints on security and access rights compliance. Today, the adoption of these regulations is widespread.  In addition to the finance sector, more and more organizations are being subject to them. As a result, security and compliance is a major concern for business leaders today. Access control has become an integral part of all security and compliance frameworks all over the world.

In addition to the need to control access rights and protect the organization’s assets, the user access review is now a mandatory control mechanism for most companies. This is particularly the case for all those subject to the following standards: ISO 27001, ISO 27002, ISAE 3402, SOC 1 and 2, SOX, CMMC, HiTrust, HIPAA, CRBF, and Solvency, among others.

In fact, the implementation of user access review campaigns is an essential prerequisite, both in responding to auditors and in adhering to the enforced security and compliance policies within organizations.

#3: Towards a governance of access rights and identities

In addition to the issues mentioned above, the review of authorizations is part of the implementation of true governance of access rights and identities. The involvement of managers at all corporate levels in access rights review campaigns is a major contribution to this. Thanks to their knowledge of the users and the scope of their functions, managers will be able to ensure the relevance and legitimacy of the access rights granted within their team. They will be responsible for approving or revoking assigned access rights.

These responsibilities not only ensure that the right access is granted to the right people, but that they provide better visibility into who has access to what. The creation of this inventory of access rights contributes to their deployment and governance.

How to effectively perform a user access review?

User access rights are implicated in a company’s data, applications, servers, and infrastructures. Depending on their location and the resources they allow access to, the nature of these access rights can change and the management of their life cycle can differ. Therefore, the chosen methodology must take into account the diversity of the perimeters to be reviewed, the volume of associated data and the objective that is being targeted.

Is it a bad idea to perform user access reviews manually?

Although a user access review can be carried out manually using Excel spreadsheets, for example, it is recommended to use an identity analytics tool designed for this purpose. The reason for this is that the review is a tedious and rigorous process that can quickly turn into a nightmare when the amount of data to be reviewed is substantial.  Rather than taking the risk of missing objectives and disappointing team leaders, it is better to aim for efficiency and serenity with an automated solution that helps to…

  • Save time by automating the different tasks (including the triggering of corrective actions)
  • Make the exercise easier by providing teams with user-friendly interfaces
  • Respond easily to auditors with ready-to-use reports available within the tool
What type of user access review should I choose?

Two review strategies are possible: the periodic and the continuous user access review. Both have specific objectives and their own logic and delivery mechanism.

The periodic user access review

The periodic user access review is generally recommended if the objective is to achieve access rights compliance. This type of review makes it possible to ensure the proper management of the information system and is similar to quality control.  It involves regularly checking that the right access is being granted to the right people.

It is based on two fundamental steps:

  • A comprehensive mapping of the access rights within the targeted scope
  • The identification and correlation of the responsibilities of each employee and the permissions he or she has to access resources

This is a time-bound exercise that must be repeated. The timing of this type of review depends on the sensitivity of the access rights it targets.

The continuous user access review

As a complement to the periodic access rights review which focuses on compliance objectives, the continuous rights review has a completely different goal: to reduce the risks associated with access rights. It is based on the observation of movements within the organization (arrival or departure of an employee, internal job changes, newly assigned permissions, security deviations, unusual access, etc.) with the aim of detecting possible security breaches that these could cause.

Carried out on an ongoing basis, it is not subject to any time constraints and focuses on all atypical situations.  Fully anchored in the operational life of the organization, it is based on a logic of continuity and analysis of the risks associated with access rights.

Because they serve different purposes, these two review strategies should be viewed as complementary in nature and as distinctly different approaches to meeting regulatory compliance and security requirements in addition to identifying and reducing access rights risk.

The user access review is an essential control function to be implemented

As shown in this article, the review of access rights is an essential control mechanism for any organization wishing to control its access rights, whatever the reason.

Nevertheless, the fact that it is indispensable does not make it any less of a task that teams often dread. To make the exercise less painful and more efficient, the application of a certain number of best practices associated with user access reviews plus the implementation of a specialized tool can be particularly useful.

Are you considering automating user access reviews?

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10 Best Practices to Optimize Your User Access Reviews

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A tedious requirement for companies

For any organization, the user access review is an important practice. As a critical component of your Identity and Access Management (IAM) strategy, this control mechanism ensures that your Information System (IS) users have legitimate and consistent access rights to your systems and applications.

For example, the user access review helps with:

  • The security and protection of your applications, network and information systems
  • The respect of your company’s security policies
  • The access rights compliance of all business and privileged users

If you have ever undertaken a user access review, you know how tedious and difficult a task it can be. Luckily, there are a few best practices that can help make it easier, quicker and more efficient to accomplish.

Before starting, plan the review of permissions

Creating the parameters of your user access review is fundamental in optimizing each step of the process, determining who the key players will be and immediately identifying potential roadblocks.

1. Define your strategy

Start by taking the time to think about your strategy in order to streamline the processes and meet the objectives you have set. Ask yourself these simple but crucial questions based on your chosen strategy:

  • What is the purpose of creating my review campaign? Who should be involved and what are their roles?
  • What type of user access review, periodic or continuous, will meet my objectives?
  • How frequently should it be done?
  • How much time will I need?
  • What deadlines will be applied?
  • What corrective action strategy should I implement?

Addressing these points will allow you to define the policies and procedures linked to your user access reviews by analyzing each of the choices in an informed manner.

2. Define the scope of the permissions review

Once you have defined the overall strategy, target the scope of what is to be reviewed. Based on the volume of access rights to be considered, you can prioritize a risk-based approach, for example, by asking these key questions:

  • What user access rights are associated with privileged accounts and sensitive systems?
  • Which of these generate control issues and risks?
  • Which ones have been affected by recent changes in users and groups?
  • Taking into consideration both security and compliance policies, which ones should I review first?
  • Who is going to review them and manage remediation?

Using this strategy usually reduces the number of user rights and accounts to be reviewed in priority by 80%, saving considerable time and allowing you to:

  • Manage deadlines
  • Increase campaign frequency
  • Improve responsiveness and quickly correct uncovered gaps
3. Enhance the reliability of your reviews

The Americans call this the principle of “Consistency and Accuracy.” In practice, this means checking the regularity and completeness of the reviews as they were created and prepared, just before their official launch. For example, all accesses within the scope shall be reviewed once and only once. Will this be the case?

Any mistake at this stage is likely to render the result of the review null and void. Based on this, you would better do the check before you involve dozens of reviewers!

However, be careful, as managing and auditing this step is not always as simple as it may seem. An example of this is the turnover of personnel, as it is likely that some of the organization’s account users may no longer have a manager assigned to them at the time the review is created. For this reason, they must be identified and re-assigned to another manager for the review of their roles and associated accesses.

Additionally, this verification will also serve as evidence for auditors, demonstrating the reliability and integrity of the data with regards to the three steps of the process: the data sources, the scope of data being review and the outcome of the review (e.g. the list of the decisions made to approve or revoke accesses).

Motivate your teams for more effective reviews

To successfully complete your user access rights review, the engagement of all the stakeholders is essential. The business teams who manage data reviews play a key role. Get them involved in the process by communicating effectively and ensuring a high degree of shared information and supporting materials.

4. Pay attention to data quality

What could be more frustrating for your colleagues than having to comb through incomprehensible or outdated data? Do your best to keep them focused and on task in order to achieve the desired results for your campaign.

Before sharing data, make sure that it has been recently updated. For example, verify that former employees have been deleted from the files and that new hires have been included.  In addition, be sure that all the information can be quickly understood and interpreted by the business managers. Otherwise stated, credentials and permissions should be explained in such a way that a detailed description of the actions and their scope is easily comprehensible.

For example, a description can be added to the technical identifier of a security group to indicate the access rights granted to the members of this group. This will make it easier and more relevant for reviewers to make decisions and will promote data security.

5. Alert the business teams to the challenges of reviewing permissions

The user review is a complex task that necessitates the responsibility of all those involved. Communication is key to getting teams motivated and engaged in the process. Each stakeholder in the campaign project must be identified and informed of the tasks that he or she will manage. Additionally, it is important to share any issues that could arise during the campaign cycle. Closely adhering to the process and the timing will help with the success of the campaign.

6. Making the review process more rewarding is possible

Using spreadsheets has its limitations, so it is time to move on to something else. Increase team productivity by providing a more user-friendly and ergonomic solution. Tools exist that allow information to be more readable and easier to handle with just a few clicks. In this way, data validation is quicker and more simple to carry out. This assists the campaign stakeholders in undertaking the tasks entrusted to them in a more active and efficient manner.

Combine your methodology with a specialized tool to automate campaigns

Once the campaign is created and the teams are in place, save time using solutions that help you to identify problems, speed up the review and meet deadlines.

7. Focus on automation

Eliminate risk due to laborious manual processes by automating your access reviews using a specialized solution. With a single interface, workflows can be streamlined to better manage campaigns and reduce the time spent on them. Meet the objectives you have set by aiming for:

  • Data reliability and quality, removing the risk of errors linked to manual data handling
  • Process traceability which enables you to effortlessly manage the campaign, track who reviewed what, and take action including reminders and escalations to ensure its full and on-time completion
  • Compliance of your user access rights. This derives from a closed-loop process that effectively improves the situation, a comprehensive audit trail and a detailed history of user reviews that can be presented to auditors
8. Provide decision support tools

In order to make informed decisions, the reviewer needs access to contextual information, such as:

  • Account access details
  • Application specifications and classification
  • Detected discrepancies
  • Earlier decisions, among others

Giving a reviewer quick access to this information helps to improve the quality of the decisions made. He or she can use this knowledge to take a closer look at the correlation between the scope of the employees’ job functions and roles and the access rights given to them, as well as control discrepancies that have already been identified, such as IT General Controls (ITGC).

The review history is particularly useful here because, as a recurring exercise, prior validated decisions probably remain valid in the absence of interim changes.

Answer the auditors at the campaign’s conclusion

The next step is to align the systems with the decisions made during the review process, ensuring compliance of the access rights involved.

9. Make sure key actions follow the conclusion of your campaign

To meet compliance requirements and recommendations from auditors, you must be able to demonstrate that corrective actions or compensatory controls have been implemented to resolve each identified issue. Corrective actions are most often requested from the IT Department via the usual channels (ITSM, IAM). Afterwards, their application must be verified.

Go beyond the audit regulations and compliance policy constraints to which companies are subjected. Following up on these points strengthens:

  • Your campaign, because real risks that are uncovered are met with quick and concrete remedies, and
  • Team effort, the actions of which have a direct impact in keeping the organization’s data secure and the user access rights compliant. The situation continually improves with each review
10. Evaluate the time spent on access rights review

Far from being a detail, the time spent actively performing a review is a key indicator. Although seemingly counterintuitive, it is a task that can be completed quickly and efficiently and easily managed by the business teams.

A review that is too long can be an obstacle to reaching your goal, and for good reason:

  • The deadlines set cannot be met, so the campaign remains unfinished
  • Poor decisions are made too quickly due to imposed time constraints

Any way you look at it, the result is not acceptable because risks are not clearly identified, applications, networks and internal systems are in danger and compliance objectives are not met.

Once your campaign is complete, create a continuous improvement process for quick evaluation. Calculate the time spent with regards to the objectives as well as the scope of the project and analyze the effectiveness of this practice over time.

If you find your teams spending countless hours or never fully completing their access rights reviews of users and accounts, consider changing your approach. Using new and innovative solutions and specialized support can help you redefine your review strategy and carry them out in more optimal conditions.

 

Need a little help for your user access reviews?
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Identity Analytics: Can an IAM Project Be Successful Without It?

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Almost two years ago, Gartner made an observation about Identity and Access Management (IAM) projects, saying that the deployment of more than half of them posed problems and was subject to major execution difficulties. Two years later, this assessment is still valid and concerns enterprises in every region of the world. Companies look for ways to combat this issue, and many have turned to RadiantOne Identity Analytics to solve the problem.

Many companies attest to the fact that these challenging projects can be tedious, costly and time-consuming, even when industry-appropriate software tools are used. The inherent complexity of IAM projects is an obstacle to the optimal use of the solutions available on the market even when the adoption of them claims to be seem seamless and simple. Radiant Logic prides itself on the growth of our Identity Analytics solutions among customers who have as a call to augment, improve and enhance the success of their IAM projects within the enterprise environment.

Identity Analytics is a key component designed to support and accelerate IAM projects. Our years of expertise in this area have been attested to by our customers around the world, mostly in America and Europe. They have sung our praises on Gartner Peer Insights and have given testimony to the fact that Radiant Logic always places the needs and requirements of the customer and their IAM/IGA projects first and foremost in their scope. This article will explain how you, our customer, can unlock its full potential in order to optimize processes and achieve successful results.

What are the challenges and issues facing IAM projects?

Impeccable data quality: an essential prerequisite

The data integrated into an IAM solution is the foundation of any project. It is a key element that defines the processes to be used by the team players and allows them to make the right decisions. The absence of data quality issues related to user access and accounts of all types makes it possible for colleagues and departments within the enterprise, not matter their size, to work together in an efficient and positive manner, making informed decisions much easier for all.

According to industry feedback, data quality is based on the following factors:

ACCURACYData must reflect the reality of the accesses and accounts and, therefore, must be thoroughly detailed. All too often, however, access management solutions, even those that are a part of an over-arching Identity and Access Governance (IGA) platform, are limited to the macro level of roles and profiles and do not provide visibility into fine-grained rights which are so crucial to the project’s success. Additionally, the link between technical rights and business activities is rarely documented and can be difficult to audit, becoming a source of errors that can lead to fraud and major deficiencies relating to internal and external security policy.
COMPLETENESSThe contextualization of data is key. For each given access right, it must be possible to clearly identify which identity has access to which resources, which systems, which application, which services, and so on. The HR context associated with this identity and on which the data is based must also be available. For example, has the access right been granted to an employee or a service provider? Has this access been granted within corporate policy? In which department does the individual work and what are his or her responsibilities?
UNIQUENESSEach piece of data must be unique and specific to a given context, and no duplicates should be present.
INTEGRITYData must always be valid and current. Knowing when it was last updated is a key aspect of its integrity. If not, it could be at risk of being compromised, which could eventually lead to fraud and other policy breaches.
AVAILABILITYImmediate access to data is a key requirement. This allows users to analyze it and make the necessary updates.
CONSISTENCYIs the data consistent across all the systems within the organization? For example, does an employee who has been terminated in the HR system still have active access rights in internal applications such as SAP?  If so, the data is not consistent, putting the project at risk for failure.

Only by combining all of these parameters can the data quality be defined as satisfactory. If any one of them is missing, the data, and any decision based on it, can be compromised. Finally, an optimal level of data quality remains necessary to demonstrate access right compliance to auditors and account security to auditors, and for this reason, a specialized tool, one that can work in conjunction with an IGA platform, is indispensable.

An IAM solution is not all-encompassing

The scope covered by most IAM solutions is often limited. They are usually only connected to a portion of the company’s systems and applications, resulting in limited coverage of the various types of accesses including technical, application, orphaned and service accounts.

In the case of an organization that accesses numerous and diverse resources (cloud and on-premise applications, infrastructure, unstructured data, etc.), it is impossible to ensure that all of them are managed by IAM solutions. Additionally, global synchronization of all systems is also impossible, no matter the size of the company or its IT department.

IAM solutions provide only partial visibility into access rights. If any of them is overlooked, goals cannot be achieved and access right compliance cannot be proven. Using an IAM solution is not enough since it does not guarantee that the correct access rights are granted to the appropriate individuals. Radiant One Identity Analytics solves this problem by identifying and mapping all access rights.

Unlock the full potential of Identity Analytics using an IAM solution

A solution for each step of the process

The deployment of an IAM project can be broken down as follows:

  • Understanding: It is necessary to first clean the data and access rights within the organization, then to enrich them with the identity context so as to better understand them
  • Determination: Once this visibility is achieved, decision-making becomes easier as does the detection of any gaps  or anomalies
  • Action: The operational part of the project can now be started once this global analysis has been completed

The first two steps of any project are related to the analysis of access rights and should be handled by Identity Analytics, while the third step concerns the operational aspect of the IAM project.

Identity Analytics is a true science of access rights, designed to help with the detection, measurement and reduction of risk related to data quality issues. A specially designed solution provides a full understanding of access rights, enabling the knowledge of who has access to what and to what extent. This clarity assists in making better decisions, which in turn helps with the overall growth and success of the IAM program.

A guaranteed return on investment

According to Gartner, deploying identity and access rights governance using Identity Analytics can forecast that a company has the opportunity to experience nearly double the return on investment. This is because Identity Analytics helps to clean and enrich the data before integrating it into the IAM solution.  It also optimizes the steps of the project, including the operational “run” phase.

Utilizing Identity Analytics is essential and allows the user to:

  • Identify and analyze all data and access rights present in all systems within the company
  • Consolidate the data by automatically and continuously correlating it (for example, Active Directory repositories and HR data)
  • View the history of the data in report format in order to perform comparative analyses
Fully-controlled access rights with RadiantOne Identity Analytics

Facilitate decisions, demonstrate access right compliance to auditors, and detect all the risks related to access rights of user, application and technical accounts. Achieving the multiple objectives of an IAM project without a dedicated Identity Analytics solution is mission impossible. Radiant Logic, a market leader, has designed Identity Analytics to meet the challenges and accelerate the pace of an IAM project, offering the guarantee of an optimal return on investment for customers in all industries and regions of the world.

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What Is Access Certification?

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Every day, companies must manage in the best way possible various types of internal changes which include employee hirings and firings, staff reassignment and turnover in general, technological improvements and external projects. These changes that influence the information systems could also alter the daily operations within the company.

One critical area that demands particular attention is employee access rights and entitlements. Because these permissions provide access to key resources and data, it is important that they be managed effectively and efficiently to ensure compliance with requirements imposed by regulatory guidelines and other types of security policies.

Access certification, another term for user access review

Reviewing access certification, which involves monitoring authorizations and permissions, supports achieving the goal of ensuring compliance with security policies. Another term that is used for this practice is user access review and aims to achieve the same result: the uncovering, inspection, approval and/or revocation of rights and permissions. In order to conduct these reviews effectively, organizations would do well to follow the best practices and the basics of access certification, associated issues and challenges, as well as campaign structures.

While user access reviews and access certification are synonymous, access certification and access recertification are not.

Securing logical access rights through access certification, a widely adopted practice.

In any organization’s Identity and Access Management (IAM) strategy, access certification is essential when used as a control function in securing logical access rights. In the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) document NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5, the AC-2 control specifies the need for access certification to “review accounts for compliance with account management requirements.” NIST CSF PR.AC-4 also draws attention to the fact that managing access permissions should follow the principles of least privilege, need-to-know and separation of duties.

What objective does access certification specifically target?

The process of reviewing authorizations and permissions is typically utilized to validate the legitimacy and accuracy of the access rights that have been granted to users to be able to enter and work in an organization’s information systems (IS). Reviews of this nature specifically seek to shed light on:

  • What individuals have access to what resources within the organization
  • The level of access that each user has been given
  • The authorized, approved and assigned permissions
  • Any access rights deemed to be unauthorized or out of scope

Access certification is applicable to all types of access rights, including those granted to external employees and third parties such as contractors and business partners. This access can pertain to databases, applications, shared files, networks and the infrastructure within the organization. Business line managers and application owners are responsible for the advanced monitoring and verification of these entitlements within the scope of their duties.

What are the difficulties inherent to performing an access certification?

Conducting a review of authorizations is a specific exercise that helps companies manage their access rights by addressing concerns related to security, compliance and governance. Below, we will highlight some of these issues.

#1: Detecting risk related to access in order to secure assets

Access certification ensures that every user is approved for access rights that are strictly necessary and sufficient for his or her job responsibilities, making it an essential part of a company’s information security policy. An effective access certification identifies all anomalies associated with assigned access rights, including detecting risky situations and enabling the adoption of corrective actions to avoid security breaches. As part of the process, reports are created for administrators in order to have a view of the overall situation. In this way, the risk of fraud or information leakage is mitigated.

Furthermore, the access certification process helps organizations comply with three core principles that are essential to cybersecurity practices for risk management and internal control: the principles of least privilege, need-to-know, and separation of duties.

#2: Compliance with regulatory requirements

In the early part of the twenty-first century, the financial sector faced an increasing number of regulatory requirements regarding compliance with security and access rights, most of which are now widely adopted. Today, however, security and compliance have become major concerns for most business leaders in offices across many different industries.

Access monitoring is now an essential component of security and compliance frameworks around the globe. In order to ensure that a company’s resources and assets are correctly monitored, many of them rely on the certification of user access as a tried-and-true control method. This is particularly true for establishments that comply with standards such as ISO 27001, ISO 27002, ISAE 3402, SOC 1 and 2, SOX, CMMC, HITRUST, HIPAA, CRBF, and Solvency, among others. In fact, scheduling and conducting these certification campaigns is a non-negotiable prerequisite for addressing auditors’ requests and complying with enforced security and compliance policies within a company.

#3: Creating a governance framework for access rights and identities

Access certification also plays a significant role in establishing the appropriate and effective governance of access rights and identities. In order to achieve this, it is important that managers at all levels of the organization participate in access rights review campaigns. Saddled with the knowledge of their own team members and their associated job functions, managers ensure that the assigned access rights are legitimate and relevant. They are also accountable for approving or revoking these permissions. This responsibility not only ensures that the correct level of access is provided to the appropriate individuals, but it also provides greater visibility into who has access to what resource. The development of this inventory of access rights contributes to its implementation and governance.

How can you optimize your access certification campaign?

Access rights are implicitly linked to a company’s data, applications, servers and infrastructure. Their nature may vary depending on the location and the resources to which they provide access. Additionally, the management of their life cycle may also differ. For this reason, the methodology adopted for access certification should take into consideration the various types of perimeters to be reviewed, the volume of the associated data and the specific objective being targeted.

What are the benefits of automating your access rights certification?

While access certification can be done manually using spreadsheets and other ineffective and time-consuming tools, it is highly recommended to be assisted by a specifically designed solution for this task. The reason for this is that the certification process can be tedious and labor-intensive, especially when there is a large volume of data to be reviewed.

Opting for an automated solution is preferable to preventing missed targeted objectives, disappointing team leaders, and potentially putting the organization itself at risk. The time-saving advantages of using an automated tool include:

  • Triggering corrective actions and other types of remediation
  • Providing user-friendly interfaces to make the exercise easier and more efficient
  • Being able to easily respond to auditors with ready-to-use reports available within the tool

What type of access certification is best suited to my needs?

The best way to understand the importance and ease-of-use of automated access certification is to see it in action. Because of how significant the results of these exercises are with regards to internal security policies and compliance with audit recommendations, it is essential to comprehend that, not only is is a simple but effective exercise, it truly is indispensable.

The periodic access certification

There are two strategies for conducting access certification: periodic and continuous reviews. Each approach has its own logic, delivery mechanism and objectives.

It is advised to utilize a periodic access certification when the goal is the compliance of access rights. Its purpose is to ensure the proper management of the information system in a way that likens itself to quality control. The periodic access review relies on regular checks to confirm that the right access is granted to the right individual. The following two steps are key in accomplishing this goal:

  • Undergoing a complete mapping of access rights within the specified scope
  • Identifying and correlating each employee’s responsibilities with their own level of access permissions to resources

This exercise must be repeated periodically, with its timing dependent upon the sensitivity of the targeted access rights.

The continuous access certification

The continuous access certification serves as a complement to its periodic counterpart which is focused on compliance objectives. The continuous access certification has a different purpose and targets the reduction of risk associated with access rights by monitoring movement within the organization related to new permission authorizations, security deviations, unusual access and changes in employee roles and functions. The aim is to detect any possible security breaches that could occur.

This type of access certification is ongoing and not bound by any time constraints and focuses on all atypical situations. Continuous certification is fully integrated into the operational life of the company and is based on a risk-analysis approach. Since both the periodic and continuous strategies have different purposes, they should be considered as complementary and distinct approaches to achieving regulatory compliance, meeting security requirements and identifying and reducing risk associated with access rights.

Something else that can be taken into consideration is the effective use of micro-certifications. This refers to performing access certifications on the delta changes that occur between review cycles. This technique is particularly useful when relatively few or less significant changes are present in the data to be analyzed. It is also suggested as an effective way of keeping a handle on and monitoring the most sensitive access, such as privileged accounts. Used in conjunction with periodic and continuous reviews, an organization can easily demonstrate that compliance of their user access across the enterprise is under control.

Implementing access certification: an essential monitoring tool for compliance

As shared and demonstrated in this article, implementing a certification process for access rights is an important and essential activity for any organization that wants to maintain control over its access rights, no matter the reason. However, despite its importance, teams often dread this task due to its tedious and time-consuming nature. To make the process more efficient and less cumbersome, applying a set of best practices associated with access certification and utilizing a specialized and automated tool can prove particularly beneficial.

 

Need a little help on your access certifications?
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Identity and Access Management: How do IAM solutions adapt to a company’s constantly evolving requirements?

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Today, organizations are aware of the need to protect their data, applications and infrastructure from cyber-attacks. For this reason, many are paying close attention to securing their logical access rights. Not only is it because they are one of the first points of entry for hackers wishing to infiltrate their information systems, but also because they are subject to regulatory compliance and security standards to which organizations must adhere. It is essential that they implement internal security policies and use specific tools to optimize the protection of their logical access rights.

The use of identity and rights management tools is part of this rationale, and the generations of Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions highlight these changing requirements related to the management, control and analysis of risks linked to access rights. These requirements are increasing in number and diversity and must be addressed to cope with escalating cyber threats. The ability of organizations to adapt their strategy is crucial.

From their inception to present day, to what extent do identity management solutions enable organizations to deploy an effective and relevant cybersecurity model to protect their logical access rights? Read on to learn more.

Identity and Access Management (IAM): The Definition

Identity and Access Management (IAM) ensures that the right people have the right access to the right resources at the right time and for the right reasons. In other words, it is a way of being sure that employees only have the access permissions that they need to perform their duties within the organization while, at the same time, respecting the principles of least privilege and segregation of duties.

Identity and Access Management monitors the lifecycle of the people who work within the organization as well as the access rights granted to them.

An Identity and Access Management system, or IAM solution, relies on a certain number of rules to recognize identities (human or machine) and groups in order to assign, modify or revoke the access rights to which they are associated with, taking into consideration their job functions and responsibilities within the company.

How Identity and Access Management (IAM) Solutions Have Evolved Over Time

Identity and Access Management has been a key topic for organizations for nearly 20 years. Initially, early IAM projects were designed to maximize operational efficiency and reduce the risks associated with managing access rights to applications and corporate resources. It then underwent several successive deployment phases that largely contributed to the evolution of the IAM solutions available in today’s market.

Continue reading to learn about the different evolutions that IAM has undergone, the context in which they took place and how its scope has continued to expand from its onset two decades ago until today.

Identity and Access Management: The Deployment of the First Generation of IAM Solutions

In the early 2000s, the first Identity and Access Management solutions available on the market were designed mainly to meet an operational challenge: the building of an enterprise directory, i.e., a repository of the people who work within the company. The purpose of creating this repository was to facilitate the identification of personnel movement (new arrivals, internal mobility, departures) and the management of the access life cycle at the user account level. The allocation, modification or deletion of these accounts could then be automated.

In addition to building an identity repository, the deployment of several services using the first IAM solutions enabled:

  • Access control on web applications
  • The creation of SSO (Single Sign-On) bricks, eliminating the need for users to have to authenticate several times in the systems
  • The implementation of identity and access life cycle management
  • The creation of an account and access provisioning system to automate technical management

Driven by the IT departments, these IAM projects helped to optimize operational efficiency and reduce the workload of their teams.

From the Management to the Governance of Identities and Access Rights

While the first IAM solutions arrived on the market to meet the needs expressed by companies, it became quickly apparent that these solutions needed to evolve. Many organizations were confronted with the limits of these solutions and were struggling to:

  • Rationalize access rights (especially when two people with the same job were supposed to have the same rights)
  • Integrate access requests into a formal and traceable approval process
  • Report and monitor elements related to the granted rights

A new generation of software products was born to address these challenges: Identity and Access Governance (IAG).

A few years later, a new milestone was reached: the IAM and Identity and Access Governance (IAG) markets merged and became Identity Governance and Administration (IGA). IGA solutions now cover a wider scope and address new challenges by:

  • Improving the management of access rights in applications and systems by generalizing the concept of rights management through the creation of roles (Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Role Modeling)
  • Promoting the respect of early regulatory compliance and risk management requirements by ensuring that individuals have relevant and compatible roles (role- based Segregation of Duties (SoD)
  • Ensuring the effectiveness of the identity management system in place by recertifying access rights and verifying that the access rights granted to each identity are legitimate
IGA: The Onset of Expanding Solutions

Starting in 2018, organizations are once again facing new challenges. While regulatory standards for the compliance and security of logical access rights are multiplying, significant internal changes are also at work as more and more organizations are moving to the cloud and creating hybrid architectures.

As a result, while controlling logical access rights is a crucial issue for organizations, the implementation of control processes is becoming more complex. Logical access rights are increasing in number and are scattered across information systems (IS), both locally and remotely in the cloud.

In addition, new stakeholders such as internal and external auditors and compliance officers are expressing new requirements in terms of managing and reducing the risks associated with access rights. The execution of user access controls and the creation of compliance reports are essential.

This is no longer just about operational efficiency: it is also about meeting the compliance and security requirements relating to user access rights within organizations.

New services are emerging to enable:

  • The implementation of Segregation of Duties controls in the systems themselves to help identify risks related to access rights in a more detailed way (fine-grained SoD)
  • The automation of access-related controls such as IT General Controls (ITGCs) in order to identify active accounts of people who have left the company, over-allocation of access rights, atypical access rights, and password policy violations
  • The creations and publication of reports and compliance audits that provide answers to internal and external auditors
  • The building of dashboards that offer more visibility to key managers within the organization

This evolution marks a decisive turning point in how organizations view cyber risks. The era of this being the concern of only the IT department is long gone. In today’s world, cybersecurity is becoming everyone’s business. It is a major priority across all departments and requires that each stakeholder have the necessary visibility to anticipate, control and reduce the risks associated with access rights and identities.

Identity and Access Management and Governance (IAM/IGA): Where do we stand today?

Today, many organizations have already started or completed their digital transformation. The rise of remote working in addition to new uses that are emerging push the limits of IAM and IGA systems.

Although previously centralized, enterprise resources are now scattered across information systems with many of them hosted outside the company’s strict physical perimeter. In these conditions, what is the best way to monitor, control and protect identities and their access?

To achieve this, companies are making a major shift away from the notion of implicit trust to a new approach: zero trust. The need to adopt a Zero Trust approach is generating new requirements.
Now more than ever, companies must have an exhaustive, global vision of logical access rights according to:

  • The people and identities that hold them,
  • The level of sensitivity of the data to which users have access,
  • Their use, relative to applications and infrastructures, and
  • Their location, either local or remote.

All this must be considered in a context where the volume of data available to organizations is constantly growing.

The new services offered by the latest IGA solutions are designed to enable organizations to:

  • Manage non-named accounts, especially privileged accounts
  • Set up governance so that they know exactly who has access to what not only from a data point of view but also from an infrastructure point of view
  • Have an analytical approach that allows them to automate all the tasks that can be automated in order to better focus on other issues as well as the security strategy in place regarding logical access rights

IAM and IGA: What problems do companies face when considering solutions currently available on the market?

While deploying IAM and IGA systems have made it possible to expand the range of services and solutions currently available on the market, many companies are faced with a major dilemma when considering what strategy to adopt.

While some are using the latest generation of IAM solutions, many are just completing the implementation of their IAM project using an older solution. This begs the question: Have the efforts and significant financial investment of the past few years all been in vain?

Not at all. There are answers to this predicament, starting with Radiant Logic’s Identity Analytics . This identity and access rights technology can be used in conjunction with existing IAM solutions to enhance any efforts and projects undertaken to date, addressing new security, compliance and access rights governance needs.

To learn more, contact us and discover how to maximize the potential of any IAM solution with RadiantOne Identity Analytics.

 

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Identity Analytics: Clean and Maintain Your Data for Security Policy Compliance

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In today’s world of Zero Trust and the need for compliance with the internal security policies of organizations across the globe, one of the first areas to address is the gaps and anomalies linked to user access. Relying on identity analytics can be an essential way to make the first strides in tackling these issues which have become so pertinent to a cyber security strategy.

Data Quality: A Prerequisite For User Access Reviews and Identity Analytics

In general, it can be said that data quality around user access is relatively poor. Staffing changes linked to departures and inter-departmental reassignments are often undertaken without updating internal repositories and directories within the HR and/or IT departments. This means that people can leave a company and still have access to accounts that they used when they were working there. If someone has malicious intent, the use of his or her account after severing a professional relationship can open the door to hacking and other breaches. On a less critical level but equally as important are dormant and orphaned accounts that are left forgotten and hidden for a number of reasons. It is best to uncover and deactivate them to prevent risky issues in the future.

When data quality is poor, it can lead to errors in interpretation. Those with access can relate to the data in a completely different manner than someone else in the team who has the same access to it. This opens the door to putting security policies and regulations within the company in jeopardy. Of course, accidents do happen, and low data quality is not always intentional. The simple notion of digital transformation and ever-changing data landscapes can lend itself to quickly “degrading” quality across the enterprise.

Identity Analytics: How Did We Get Here?

If we take a closer look at how companies get themselves into this predicament, it is relatively easy to understand. First and foremost, the volume of data within an organization is monumental. The smallest of errors, such as a missed key stroke, can falsify the information within databases and other storage areas that can cause problems down the road. In fact, manual data entry is one of the most important reasons for poor data quality.

But what about repository drift? This happens when the manner in which objects are configured changes over time, resulting in inconsistencies. An example of this is when a security setting is changed in one part of the system but goes undocumented or is not applied to all areas of the system. Additionally, directories and repositories are disparate in nature, which can create discrepancies when doing any data-correlation processes.

The same goes for faulty naming conventions which sometimes can wreak havoc in a database for reasons of a capital letter or misplaced hyphen. Lastly, let’s not forget changes within the company that are not correctly documented within systems across the enterprise, such as HR data which is not transmitted or shared with technical teams who would need to update their own files accordingly.

Can We Fix It With Identity Analytics?

Luckily, tools like RadiantOne Identity Analytics can come to the rescue for many of these issues. To start with, one of its main functions is to create an access inventory. With this feature, it will be possible to know who has access to what resources at any time. Once the access inventory is created, all of the data regarding accesses and accounts linked to a particular identity will be correlated. This is a part of the clean-up process that gathers and relegates identity-related access to one spot. If there is any missing information, or if the information that has been correlated is inaccurate or incorrect, it can be enriched and updated so as to be pertinent and relevant for analysis.

All of these efforts serve one targeted purpose: to uncover quality issues that may exist in the access data in order to rectify and remediate them. Inaccurate data in any information system can open the door to all types of risk, but identity data is particularly sensitive, as it is often used as a way for malicious employees and hackers to enter a company’s network through the back door in utilizing the account of an unaware entity.

Identity Analytics: The Advantages of Clean Data

It probably doesn’t take a lot to understand the extreme importance of clean data in any information system. So many issues, including cyber risk and poor decision-making, can interfere with the smooth running of the organization’s daily business practices because of it.

Using a solution like RadiantOne Identity Analytics to improve the data quality to a point of perfection can help companies to:

  • Prove compliance with security policies based on access
  • Enhance IAM and IGA programs
  • Minimize risk
  • Reduce costs and increase ROI

Before starting any project or program, the data quality must be ascertained and, if needed, improved or corrected. No one wants erroneous results based on erroneous data. Remember the adage: junk in, junk out. No better statement applies to this case.

Identity Analytics: What Else Can It Do?

Many companies rely on the power of identity analytics to help with data quality, the first step in undertaking any project or program based on access. But what are the other strengths of the solution, and how can you get the most out of it?

Access Inventory

One of the very first things that we think of when it comes to identity analytics is a way to get a thorough understanding of each and every access which resides within our information systems. For this, the first task at hand is to create an access inventory. Once done, this inventory can lead the way to access mapping – learning who has access to what and how they got it.

As mentioned previously, it is imperative that data cleaning be done at the inventory level in order to provide accurate mapping results. This inventory and mapping then can aid in the creation of an identity catalog that contains accurate and up-to-date information regarding the data associated with access rights and permissions across the company.

Automation of Quality Controls

One of the key points of using an identity analytics solution is the fact that it can help control the quality of access data in an automated way.

Take the case of the Human Resources department. Every day, there are employees who join the company and others who leave. In either case, there are access rights and permissions, some linked to applications and others to shared folders or other data sources. How is all of this monitored? Are we sure that the person who left the company has had all of his access revoked? And if not, how can we be entirely sure that it will not lead to a risk of cyber-attack or fraud?

Radiant Logic’s Identity Analytics solution includes over 150 controls out of the box, controls for which user-friendly dashboards display results based on the data ingested into the tool. From these dashboards, managers can see if there are any risky situations, such as dormant or orphaned accounts or accounts still assigned to people who have left the company. Because of the risk ranking, the most problematic areas can be addressed immediately, substantially reducing the risk by correcting them as a top priority. If there are any questions or concerns, a 360° view of the troublesome accounts or identities can be accessed at the click of a button.

Analytics

It might seem that this aspect of identity analytics is the most obvious, but in reality, it could be seen as the most confusing. What is truly meant by the word “analytics” in the phrase “identity analytics?”

To start with, we have to go back to the crux of the issue which is, in fact, the identity. More specifically, we are referring to any access that an identity has to resources within an organization. Simply put, this would answer the question, “Who has access to what assets within the company?”

In seeking to respond to this question, one of the first things that comes to mind is the need to know of any anomalies, defects or gaps in the data linked to identity access. Are we sure that Person A should have read and write privileges to the payroll files? Why has Person B been added to the group that has privileged access to highly sensitive financial applications? And this dormant account is attributed to a person who left the company over three months ago. Not only do these problems have to become visible to those who monitor and manage access, but they have to be scored and ranked in order of importance. In this way, the riskiest gaps can be handled as a priority in the task list.

Another significant piece of identity analytics is its influence and expertise in providing analytics of a predictive nature. This means that an identity analytics solution is capable of suggesting future outcomes based on historical data modeling and mining techniques. Not only will an understanding of what happened in the past be made available, but an awareness of possible future issues and problems with previously unknown and potential risk can be brought to light.

An example of this is when complications regarding Segregation of Duties (SoD) are uncovered. Sally in the accounting department inadvertently has been given permission to not only write checks but also to sign those very checks. Whether she is aware of this conflict or not, it is easy to see that various systems internal to her company are offering her the opportunity to wreak havoc if she was of a malicious nature. Predicting the potential outcome of fraud or other forms of financial risk is one of the ways that identity analytics can be beneficial to organizations.

Lastly, identity analytics solutions can utilize machine-learning techniques to ingest, correlate and study identity data with the goal of bringing to the surface any anomalies, gaps or black holes. In doing so, there is an even deeper analysis of risk linked to identity, access and permissions that helps companies prevent all types of fraud and unwelcome breaches. When defects are found, corrective action and remediation suggestions are automatically put forward. Once rectified, decisions can be made based on accurate, up-to-date information that was, up to this point, unknown or masked within the information system. The result is a high level of compliance with internal security policies as well as time and cost savings which increase the overall return on investment.

Identity Analytics and the User Access Review

Another key feature of any identity analytics platform is typically the functionality related to performing user access reviews. Campaigns of this nature are very often required by regulatory entities such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), SOC1/2, HIPAA, ISO27001 and the like. Simply stated, it means that a company must be able to produce data and reports that show who has access to what, when they got it, who authorized it and what they do with the information to which they have access. As can be easily understood, this information often requested by auditors helps a company prove compliance with its internal as well as external security policies. Additionally, it is an essential way of highlighting any underlying risk which could be lurking in the information systems.

Surprisingly, many companies of all sizes are still doing user access reviews in a manual fashion.  They can be described by review owners as being tedious and time-consuming and are the bane of many who are unmotivated or downright adverse to performing them, often on a monthly or quarterly basis. Managers in charge of reviews, approvals or remediation activities often consider that this is not part of their “day job,” and for this reason, it is quite common for reviews to be only half-completed or not finished at all. This, in turn, creates compliance and risk problems that were mentioned previously.

The key reasons for what some refer to as “review fatigue” are:

  • A voluminous amount of data to be reviewed
  • Difficulty with the coordination of supporting tasks
  • Hard to motivate the review teams due to miscomprehension of technical data
  • Reviews frequently not finalized

Additionally, those who manage and perform user access reviews feel that they do not always get an exhaustive view of all of the access. This can also include accounts with sensitive or privileged access. There are concerns that the dashboards and reporting that is provided by the analytics solution are limited regarding follow-up and follow-through and do not lend themselves to communicating with upper management about the progress and the results of the review. At times, the data is not current which leads to situations, access and accounts that have to be reviewed over and over.

When it comes to the choice of a solution, it is important to understand whether or it will help to facilitate decision-making based on the results of the review. This is because there are times when contextual information is missing, such as information from the HR department, technical details or the responsibilities and job functions of the identities being reviewed. Furthermore, if the tool is complex and unwieldy, it is seen by reviewers as being too difficult to use. If it is not utilized in the correct manner, the risks linked to the identities being analyzed are not uncovered. Atypical situations, anomalies and gaps are difficult to highlight with tools that are presumed to be ineffective.

RadiantOne Identity Analytics Does the Job

Luckily, there is a solution on the market that is well-known and praised for the precision with which it handles user access reviews. Its strength lies in these 4 key areas:

  • The collection and correlation of any type of data from disparate sources
  • The user-friendliness that leads to efficient and fact-based decision-making
  • Automated, time-saving methods that handle a significant amount of employee and resource data
  • Proof of compliance based on continuous monitoring

The value proposition of doing user access reviews with Radiant Logic Identity Analytics is three-fold: review assistance, gap management and proven compliance.

Review Assistance

One of the biggest complaints about doing user access reviews, especially those that are done manually, is that there is little to no outside help in being successful when performing them.

With Radiant Logic Identity Analytics, the entire process of doing periodic access reviews is streamlined and automated. The preparation and launching of the review process is easy and effective, and once implemented, the solution can return results in as little as four to six weeks.  The solution itself is ergonomic in nature and can interface seamlessly with sources of data that are needed to perform the reviews. Very often, out-of-box connectors are readily available in Radiant Logic’s Marketplace, making it even simpler to ingest data into the platform.  Decision-making based on remediation suggestions from the tool itself is quick and easy and based on control and gap analysis.

Gap Management

In order to stay on top of any defects or gaps in the identity analysis, Radiant Logic’s solution automates the continuous monitoring of access rights. This is done with a series of snapshots of the state of the data at any given time. Every time a review is performed, a snapshot is taken of the data and kept in the history banks to provide a continual look at the evolution of the access data over time. Auditors are especially pleased with this aspect of the tool, as results of any given review are captured, logged and stored should any unusual situation occur in the future.

By doing this continuous monitoring, gaps and anomalies are uncovered and shown to the review manager by use of the integrated dashboards. They are also scored and ranked with regard to the level of risk that they pose. This helps the review owners to target the situations of highest risk, reducing any issues that could cause auditors to throw up red flags with regards to compliance.

Perhaps the most convenient aspect of Identity Analytics is its ability to interface directly with third-party ticketing systems such as ServiceNow or Jira. Any remediation suggestions or corrective actions that need to be acted upon can be loaded without human intervention, and the follow-up of these remediations can also be automated to ensure that they have been completed. In the event a ticket system is not included in the process of managing a company’s access, automated emails can be launched and directed to the pertinent personnel in the IT department responsible for handling these changes.

Proven Compliance

RadiantOne Identity Analytics provides a feature that manual access reviews cannot: quickly and effectively responding to auditor questions when compliance with security policies is called into question.  Because the processes are automated, responses and reporting are quasi-instantaneous.  Additionally, the reports in PDF format are greatly appreciated as a third-party support to proving compliance as, with manual reviews and spreadsheets, human errors can be rampant and cause inconsistent and erroneous review results.  In addition to providing answers to auditors, the reports that are created in just one click can also be used to help prove compliance with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, SOC1/2, HIPAA and ISO27001.

Identity Analytics is a Key Component of Your Cybersecurity Strategy

This article highlights and shares the many reasons why identity analytics is crucial in facing and handling issues and problems that are faced when considering a cyber security strategy within an organization. Many breaches and fraudulent acts can be narrowed down to one source of data: access related to identities. Access-related data is spread throughout a company’s information systems and can be hidden, forgotten or just hard to find or categorize. If this access is not analyzed and monitored in an on-going and systematic manner, it is very hard to prove compliance with both internal and external security policies and regulations. Risks based on identity data as well as controls to uncover, score and rank these risk levels are crucial to maintaining a posture of cyber-security readiness and alertness. By using a solution such as RadiantOne Identity Analytics, knowing who has access to what and if the access is accurate, approved and legitimate is easy, effective and painless.

 

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What Is Privileged Access?

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Whether on-premise or in the cloud, privileged access is everywhere, scattered throughout a company’s infrastructure. On average, there are three times as many privileged accesses as there are employees within an organization.

All organizations now use privileged access to be able to utilize certain business applications, information systems or the overall infrastructure of a company. Understanding its usefulness and being able to identify where and when it is being used is crucial to managing the security of the organization’s data, applications and infrastructures.

What are the main characteristics of privileged access?

The use of privileged accounts differs from entity to entity, organization to organization and context to context. Not surprisingly, this means that the definition and characteristics of this type of access can vary significantly. Therefore, it is essential to accurately define the invariables commonly associated with privileged access.

What is the definition of privileged access?

A privileged account gives the user a higher level of access to resources and infrastructures than would be granted to the user of a standard account. Because of this, individuals with privileged access have the necessary authorization to perform operations considered to be of a sensitive or confidential nature on systems and tools used within a department or company.

Contrary to popular belief, the inventory of privileged accounts in an organization is not limited to Windows or Unix administrator accounts. Areas such as infrastructure, applications, data storage, and SaaS environments all have “super user” access with specialized, or privileged, permissions that need to be managed. For example, on SAP systems, any account with a “SAP_ALL” permission is automatically considered to be privileged access.

How are privileged accesses used?

Privileged accesses make it possible to carry out activities that are essential to the proper functioning of an organization, such as:

  • the configuration of systems and software in addition to the execution of administrative tasks
  • the creation, modification and suppression of user accounts
  • the installation of software and applications
  • the back-up, updating, modification and deletion of data
  • the carrying out of security and corrective actions
  • the management of privileged access to data within a company

What are the different types of privileged access?

Based on recent industry research, privileged accesses are used quite frequently, cover a wide range of purposes and include two major categories: named and shared accounts.

Named Accounts

Associated with exclusive users, named accounts are easily identified due to their unique nomenclature, such as adm-user-name. 

The following are a few examples of named accounts.

  • The domain administrator account gives its user full access to all workspaces and servers in a given network domain.
  • The local administrator account provides access to the resources available locally on a device or a server, such as files, directories, services and applications.  The user has full rights to configure, modify or delete some or all of these resources based on his privileged credentials.
  • The super user account, like that of an information system administrator, is frequently utilized for the on-boarding and off-boarding of employees, making it easy for the user to add or remove them from a system or an application.
  • The sales, marketing and human resource managers have business access accounts which, due to the nature of their job functions and responsibilities, may give them privileged access to certain applications and data. While this access is limited to a given scope related to the sector they cover, it could allow them to grant or remove access from members of their team.
Shared accounts

Non-named, or shared accounts, are not linked to individuals but are used by multiple people. Although there are no clear definition standards, one may distinguish between:

  • Service accounts (for inter-application communication, operating systems and the running of applications or programs. These accounts are not designed for human access).
  • Technical or generic accounts (for users to access an infrastructure or a software brick)

These accounts are generally under the responsibility of the IT departments, including remote maintenance and support. However, sharing an account means sharing its credentials (login identifier and password), which can cause a security risk.

Although not exhaustive, this comprehensive list of account types gives a good overview of the range of situations in which it is necessary to grant or utilize privileged access rights. More importantly, it highlights the need to closely control and manage them since they operate on sensitive data.

Identifying your organization’s privileged accesses is a priority

Many organizations are faced with an increase in cyber attacks as they undergo their digital transformation. Telecommuting, the creation of digital workplaces, and storing data in the cloud are examples of adding new uses and work environments that generate heightened risk related to access rights. When employees have more flexibility on a daily basis, hackers see it as an opportunity to more easily infiltrate their organization’s information systems and get unauthorized access to internal tools and credentials, among other things.

For this reason, privileged access is a prime target. It is crucial to understand why and learn how to identify them within a company.

What is the reason for identifying privileged access?

Based on a survey done In 2021, 74% of organizations that fell victim to cyber attacks claim that their privileged accounts were involved. Because the accounts give access to the most sensitive and confidential resources, identifying and protecting them is a key issue for the reasons stated below.

  • They allow highly impactful operations by providing access to sensitive systems, including financial data and payment services.
  • The holders of such accounts access confidential business, financial, and employee-related data that cannot be compromised under any circumstances.
  • Like standard access rights, privileged access is subject to compliance regulations.

Whether responding to auditors or protecting the company from critical attacks, the recognition of privileged accesses and their activity must be closely controlled, monitored  and managed using a precise and effective strategy.

How are privileged accounts detected?

As mentioned earlier, privileged access is widespread throughout a company’s information systems. Because their characteristics vary depending on how they are used, it can make it difficult to locate them. Despite this, identifying them in order to be able to protect them is crucial. Here are three best practices that help with this.

1. The reporting of privileged accesses at the time of their creation

Privileged accounts must be able to be detected as soon as they are created. When new resources are added or changes are made to areas like applications and information systems, processes must be put into place within the organization to disclose the privileged accesses associated with these new resources. The owners of these resources then report each new privileged access and document how it will be used.

2. The execution of a script to automate their identification and provide security

When a new standard system is deployed, the associated privileged accesses are often already known and must be immediately protected. At the same time as the notification is made by the resource owners, it is possible to automate the security of newly created privileged accounts within a Privileged Access Management (PAM) system.

For example, when creating a new Windows or Linux system, the script deploying the server must automatically declare privileged accounts within the PAM system being used.

3. Performing a specific audit

In the event where it appears that some privileged accounts might be hidden or missing, an audit to find them using a scanning tool provided by the PAM vendor, such as DNA or Accounts Discovery from CyberArk, can be scheduled.

Whether a company relies on a Windows or Linux infrastructure, or if their goal is to be able to track privileged access within Active Directory, it is imperative to use a privileged account management solution.

Protecting privileged access is an ongoing challenge for any organization.

It is of the utmost importance to be able to distinguish between standard and privileged accounts in order to carefully monitor and manage them.

Due to their diversity, their widespread presence within internal systems and the nature of the information to which they give access, privileged access accounts must be protected as effectively as possible. To meet the challenge, creating a policy for managing these accesses and using a specialized tool is essential.

In parallel, the implementation of specific methodologies and additional technologies should be considered in order to protect and secure an organization’s privileged accesses in an efficient and exhaustive manner.

For more detailed information about this topic, contact us.

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What Are The Best Practices For A PAM Solution And Privileged Access Management?

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The consensus is that a Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution has become essential to reduce risk and deal with the cyberattacks to which privileged access is increasingly exposed.  However, certain difficulties remain once these solutions that aim to secure, control and manage an organization’s privileged accounts have been implemented. So, what is the best way to control the risks linked to these privileged accesses?

One way to do it is to set up governance for your privileged accounts to meet these challenges. Let’s take a closer look at the critical steps required to implement it and the resulting best practices.

What security issues will a PAM solution address?

When it comes to managing privileged access, using a PAM solution is crucial for:

  • Securing the organization as a whole, and more specifically, the IT departments and services
  • Monitoring and controlling privileged accounts
  • Tracking the different ways in which privileged accounts are used

It should be noted that, while confusion is common, a PAM solution is different from an IAM solution. A PAM solution is intended to focus on privileged access within an organization, differing from its IAM counterpart that handles the management of all types of access, the identity lifecycle and permissions.

What are the advantages of a PAM system?

The implementation of a PAM system offers multiple advantages, such as:

  • Centralizing the management of privileged access. Controlling and taking stock of the overall situation becomes easier
  • Monitoring the life cycle of each privileged access right. If a temporary access right is granted, the tool makes it easy to determine its critical aspects
  • Reinforce security around these access rights by identifying each user and knowing to what information, resource or network he or she has access
  • Ensuring the traceability in the PAM tool of each user’s activity by having access to both the accounts and the duration of each session. It is even possible to record sessions and track the detailed activity of the most sensitive privileged accounts within the organization’s systems
The PAM System: Focus on Automated Privileged Account Management.

A PAM system makes it possible to group all privileged accounts and associated access rights in a secure space in order to centralize and automate their management. Additionally, when an account is managed by the PAM system, the solution changes its password. Access to the account is then only possible through the PAM system. Since access to privileged accounts is no longer shared, it becomes possible to track each user who accesses it by using his unique, individual password credentials.

By centralizing the management of privileged access, the protection of a company’s most sensitive resources and applications is assured.

The One Best Practice to Follow is Privileged Access Governance

You have managed and secured your privileged accounts by installing a PAM solution. However, to monitor the situation and ensure compliance, you need to take the next step and implement true privileged account governance.

What are the benefits of Implementing privileged account governance?

Do you want to remove the gray areas and ensure the protection of your privileged accounts by identifying the associated risks and impacts? Expand the field of possibilities by introducing governance of these accounts:

1: Audit the PAM system

Are you sure that you have identified all the administrators and users of your PAM tool? To secure your resources within the organization’s network, you have to be able to check who has access to what and how, at any time.

By implementing true governance, you benefit from this as well as from a better control of the situation. It becomes much easier to ensure that the best practices for the use of your PAM system are respected (password rotation, access partitioning) to confirm that license usage is optimized in order to justify your investment.

2: Communicate (KPIs, compliance)

Your auditors want answers fast. There is a strong need to streamline the recertification process of your privileged accesses, whether they be secured or not through your PAM solution. One of the main goals of privilege governance is to help you better meet compliance guidelines (Sarbanes-Oxley, ISO 27001, PCIDSS, etc.) and disclose the overall situation.

3: Control the quality and ITGCs

Making sure that the general controls, or ITGCs, are executed with precision becomes much easier. Keep an eye on the most at-risk populations (especially subcontractors) while maintaining the quality of your data within the account repositories (Active Directory). Anticipating administration errors and optimizing the performance of the PAM system will be facilitated.

4: Remove the gray areas by extending the perimeter of the PAM system

Whether or not your sensitive rights are managed by the PAM solution, there is no need to spend countless hours researching and detecting privileged accounts within your organization.

By implementing governance, you can enrich the data collected, map access rights from end to end and automate the correlation of the data from multiple sources (HR, AD, PAM, CMDB, logs, etc.). In this way, you will obtain an exhaustive vision of your access rights.

5: Evaluate compliance with the company’s security policies

It is important to be sure that the security policies that govern your PAM solution are being followed. The good news is that you will now be able to detect the risks linked to these security policies, to visualize their evolution and to anticipate their impact on the organization’s processes.

Access granted to your subcontractors and rights granted on a temporary basis will be entirely under control.

6: Speed up your PAM program

The goal is to secure the most sensitive privileged accounts as quickly as possible. Privileged account governance is key in achieving this objective as it allows the prioritization of the onboarding into the PAM tool, taking into account the risks linked to the security policies and associated business constraints.

It is possible to take back control of your privileged accounts!

Clearly, setting up governance for your privileged accounts is a great way to complement the scope of your PAM solution, while at the same time, giving it a real boost.

All doubts will be eliminated, and the risks will be better monitored and controlled.

Need help securing your privileged accounts? Contact us.

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What Can Identity Teams Take From Data Management? Start With an Identity Data Catalog

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This past week, Gartner Research published a new report, “4 Steps to Improve IAM Capabilities Using Data Management Top Practices” (written by Nathan Harris and Ehtisham Zaidi) with recommendations for identity teams on how to improve IAM program maturity by leveraging data management capabilities and practices. This happens to be an area of (rabid) interest for us here at Radiant Logic because we have been working with identity data for over 20 years, and we see a lot of similarities between identity data management and what we lovingly call our “parallel universe”—the master data management market.

So, let’s take a closer look—we’ll start with their overall assessment and go from there:

“Organizations that adopt leading data management practices in support of their IAM program will realize 40% improvement in time to value delivery for key IAM program objectives than their peers.”

Wow. That is a pretty incredible statistic, but we know it’s true because we have helped many customers achieve similar results with RadiantOne. Let’s dive into why…

What is IAM Lacking?

IAM is struggling to deliver security and business value today—so what is missing? As Gartner puts it: “Data management challenges—including data availability, data integration difficulties and data quality issues—contribute to limiting/slowing progress toward IAM capability maturity in most organizations.”

The problem is two-fold:

  1. Organizations are focused on the key problem they are trying to solve (SSO, PAM, MFA, etc.), and are lacking a cohesive strategy for how to manage and access their underlying identity data; and,
  2. Most IAM vendors haven’t baked in the identity data management capabilities that make it possible to operate well within a complex identity infrastructure with multiple, varied data sources (LDAP directories, Active Directories, SQL databases, cloud sources, etc.).

“Most organizations focus on acquisition and implementation of IAM “action” technologies, such as authentication, access management (AM), identity governance and administration (IGA) and privileged access management (PAM) as their primary strategy for achieving desired business outcomes. However, the data management capabilities for IAM product vendors are … not strong… the strategy of relying primarily on IAM vendors for IAM data management often leaves client organizations with substantial gaps and slow overall value delivery.” 

Insufficient identity data management capabilities result in: 

  • Ineffectiveness of IAM overall, and IGA in particular
  • Additional costs for implementation and integration
  • Slowed time-to-value for IAM projects
  • Inability to implement Zero Trust Architecture
  • Increased security risk
  • Stalled and costly implementation of IGA tools

This frustrating outcome can be seen across a number of projects, but particularly for IGA, where Gartner has said that 50% of deployments are “in distress.” The report notes that ready access to high-quality identity data is especially crucial for IGA success and time-to-value, as organizations endeavor to extend access control across complex infrastructures.

This finding ties in with another recent Gartner report (“Market Guide for Identity Governance and Administration”) that highlights the importance of a data integration and analytics layer to enable IGA and other IAM capabilities. That report found that IGA analytics could reduce access administration and governance costs by 50%, by improving human decision-making and reducing manual tasks. Analytics are key for removing the “drag” on project value stemming from unavailability of data, poor-quality data, and difficulty getting to the insights that really matter.

Let me give an example. Some of the impactful use cases for IGA analytics are:

  • Detecting orphan accounts
  • Assigning understandable risk scores
  • Identifying over-permissioned access
  • Finding Segregation of Duties violations
  • Modeling roles that conform to least-privilege
  • And providing recommendations for access rights assignments

These analytics-powered capabilities supercharge the effectiveness of an IGA deployment, and they rely on access to all of an IAM system’s (integrated) data. When all of that data is compiled in a single, vendor-agnostic repository, it can then be used by every tool within your IAM infrastructure as a single source of truth. But more about that in a minute…

This is why Radiant Logic has focused on “the data layer” as the right place for adding value in the IAM market—the consuming layer (AM, IGA, PAM, applications, etc.) is necessary, but the identity data driving decisions made by those systems must be instantly available and high-quality for those solutions to be effective. To get more value from these downstream solutions, organizations need tools for managing identity data across distributed systems.

So, how can organizations leverage data management capabilities to improve the IAM system?

An IAM Data Catalog is the Starting Point for IAM Effectiveness

Gartner strongly recommends beginning with an IAM data catalog, calling it “the most important first step” for addressing the data availability and quality issues that limit IAM effectiveness.

“IAM data availability and quality issues significantly limit IAM capability effectiveness in many organizations… documenting an IAM data catalog (what data you need, what data you have, where it’s coming from, where it’s going to) is the most important first step in identifying and addressing these issues.”

An IAM data catalog (or IAM data dictionary, which can grow up one day to be an identity warehouse, identity data hub, etc.) is an accounting of “what data you need, what data you have, where it’s coming from, where it’s going to.” And, with Radiant Logic’s point-and-click tools for connecting data across systems into a central abstraction layer, this process is made much easier.

 

 

The best practice Gartner recommends is to complete a data catalog across all of an organization’s IAM infrastructure, versus for individual IAM solutions. We think this holistic approach is the right one, as it positions the organization to continue to benefit from the IAM data catalog with every subsequent project (which will all benefit from an understanding of what data is where, as well as streamlined access to that data).

What Capabilities Will Make the Biggest Impact for IAM?

To realize value from IAM investments in the face of complex systems, data management capabilities are key. “Most IAM technologies assume that data is pulled from a limited number of authoritative sources, and have limited abilities for complex data consolidation and data enrichment requirements.” …Radiant Logic is not in this camp. We live for complex identity data consolidation and data enrichment.

Radiant Logic’s platform helps identity teams to build the IAM data catalog and leverage data management capabilities for IAM with tools that:

  • Map and translate data, handle multiple protocols to present a central identity data pipeline to multiple IAM systems
  • Discover and model relationships across sources
  • Add relevant descriptions to entitlement data, such as data owners, user-friendly risk scores, etc.
  • Perform correlation automatically, build complete profiles containing all attributes for users with multiple accounts
  • Support flexible schemas so that consuming systems can access the data in the format they require, even when data is stored in a different schema in the underlying source
  • Extend the system with more attributes, without making changes to existing sources or creating more silos
  • Deliver visibility (a “critical enabler of all other IAM action controls” per Gartner) into user information down to the permission level, for human and machine identities
  • Leverage analytics to empower identity teams and businesspeople to assess and mitigate risk efficiently, via impactful insights and user-friendly interfaces and processes

We offer the identity data and analytics layer that bridges the divide between the data you have, and the actions you need to take. Our agnostic approach lets you work with the identity sources and tools you have today, or will have in the future, to implement IAM initiatives faster. With increased visibility and analytics-driven intelligence, the RadiantOne platform helps organizations improve outcomes across the IAM stack.

Gartner’s Recommendations for Improving IAM Program Maturity

For organizations looking to optimize IAM systems and improve time-to-value, Gartner recommends:

  • Prioritizing visibility/observability to get high-quality, actionable data
  • Starting with an IAM data catalog (aka IAM data dictionary)
  • Including data management capabilities and practices as requirements in the IAM solution set
  • Working with data and analytics to identify further opportunities for improvement

IAM maturity is the means to the end of reducing risk while improving operational efficiency—and you can speed that evolution by adopting data management capabilities as a foundational tenet of your IAM strategy. Radiant Logic has been helping organizations accelerate time-to-value for IAM projects for over 20 years—book a demo to see our identity data management and analytics platform in action.

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