Identity and Access Management Archives

Save Costs and Boost Security with Automated User Provisioning and Deprovisioning

Provisioning and de-provisioning are critical processes in managing access to data and systems within an organization. Proper provisioning ensures new employees receive the access rights they need to perform their jobs effectively. Conversely, de-provisioning ensures access is promptly revoked when an employee leaves the organization, preventing unauthorized access to sensitive information.

Failing to provision or de-provision users correctly results in several issues.

Delays in provisioning mean users don’t have the access they need, and that’s productive time lost
Users with inappropriate access may inadvertently modify or delete important data, leading to inaccuracies
Former employees with lingering access, after they exit the organization, can pose significant security threats, leading to data breaches
Organizations may face regulatory fines and reputational damage if they fail to manage access controls

Most of these problems are caused by a manual process for provisioning and de-provisioning – here’s why.

Time-Consuming Processes: IT teams spend a significant amount of time creating, managing, and disabling user accounts, which can delay access for new hires and leave security gaps when employees depart. A manual process involves multiple steps and approvals, such as filling out forms, sending emails, waiting for responses, and logging into different systems, which can be tedious, repetitive, and prone to delays or failures, especially when dealing with many users or frequent changes. Automated provisioning reduces this process from days to just minutes.
Human Errors: Manual processes are susceptible to mistakes, such as granting incorrect access rights or failing to revoke access promptly. For example, a user may be granted access to a resource they should not have, or a user may be left with access to a resource that they no longer need. These errors can cause security breaches, compliance issues, operational problems, or data leaks.
Lack of Consistency: Ensuring consistent application of access policies is difficult, leading to potential security vulnerabilities. Provisioning done poorly creates problems with employee onboarding and offboarding, thus straining relationships between departments and adding unnecessary stress across an organization. Governance, risk, security, and compliance teams are frustrated when employees have too much access or access they don’t need or, worse when poor offboarding doesn’t remove access for someone who has left the organization.
Lack of auditability: A manual process may not provide a clear and comprehensive record of who has access to what, when, why, and how. This can make it difficult to monitor, review, and report on user activity and access rights, as well as to detect and respond to any anomalies or incidents. Manual processes may fail to meet regulatory requirements for user provisioning and de-provisioning, such as separation of duties, role-based access control, and identity verification.

A manual provisioning and de-provisioning process brings with it certain direct and indirect costs.

Direct Costs: The time and resources required to manage user accounts manually can add up, diverting IT staff from more strategic tasks.
Indirect Costs: Inconsistent access management can lead to security breaches, regulatory fines, and damage to the organization’s reputation.

That’s why it’s time to make the move to automated user provisioning and de-provisioning.

1. Access control in real-time

Automated systems ensure that new employees have instant access to the necessary resources, enhancing productivity from day one. Automated provisioning sets up access and privileges for each resource in the organization based on the employee’s role and company rules. When an admin adds, edits, or removes a user, the system automatically adjusts the access—turning it on, changing it, or turning it off. Similarly, access can be promptly revoked for departing employees, mitigating security risks.

2. Consistent application of policies

Automation enforces consistent access policies across the organization, reducing the likelihood of errors and ensuring compliance with industry regulations. By automatically giving and taking away access based on set rules, it reduces the chance of unauthorized access. This automatic system eliminates human error, lowering the risk of security breaches.

3. Reduction in administrative overhead

By automating repetitive tasks, IT teams can focus on more strategic initiatives, reducing the overall administrative burden and operational costs.

A study by Aberdeen Group found that effective onboarding can improve new hire productivity by 60% and reduce turnover by 50%. Using automation software and remote support, companies can speed up the onboarding process and help new employees get up to speed faster.

4. Minimizing the Risk of Data Breaches

Automated deprovisioning ensures that former employees no longer have access to sensitive data, significantly lowering the risk of data breaches and unauthorized access. According to a Thales report, human actions can compromise security, with 44% of their survey respondents saying they’ve experienced one. In the past year alone, 14% reported a breach.

So how do you choose the right tool to automate user provisioning and deprovisioning?

Integration capabilities: Ensure the tool integrates with your existing systems and applications. This will reduce the time required to set up infrastructure components, such as virtual machines, databases, and networking resources, accelerating time-to-market for applications and services.
Scalability: As your organization grows, the number of access requests will also increase. So, choose a solution that can grow with your organization and adapt to changing needs.
Ease of Use: Look for tools with intuitive interfaces that simplify the setup and management of user provisioning and de-provisioning. Use automated provisioning software that can handle tasks like assigning IP addresses, configuring DNS, and setting permissions for employees and clients. This helps integrate the entire work infrastructure of an organization with just a click.

Automating user provisioning and de-provisioning is a smart investment for organizations looking to enhance security, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. But you need to implement the right automation tools so your organization can ensure immediate access control, consistent policy application, reduced administrative overhead, and minimized risk of data breaches. Our experts at Akku can help you with that. Reach out to us today.

Boost security, streamline operations: Here’s how IAM can help your ITeS/BPO business

In the ITeS and BPO industry, striking the right balance between productivity and security can mean the difference between success and failure. Security breaches can have serious financial and reputational consequences, but at the same time an excessive tilt to security at the cost of efficiency can hurt competitiveness.

Let’s dive a little deeper into the key challenges that most ITeS and BPO businesses face, which find solutions in identity an access management.

High employee turnover

The BPO industry is known for its high employee turnover (some reports peg it as high as 40%). This means a continuous cycle of provisioning, de-provisioning, and updating access for constantly changing staff – a logistical nightmare for your IT admin team, and a high risk for unauthorized access.

Remote work

The pandemic may be behind us, but remote work remains 3-4x as prevalent as it was in 2019. Ensuring secure access is a major challenge this presents because the office firewall just doesn’t cut it anymore. At the same time, applying excessive restrictions across the board often stifles productivity.

Data sensitivity

At most ITeS and BPO companies, there are significant volumes of sensitive client data to be managed. Unauthorized access to this data is a major can result in major erosion of client trust and loss of business.

Complex access needs

Employees often need access to multiple systems and applications, each with different access requirements. Improper manual management of these access rights can lead to errors and security gaps.

Here’s how IAM solves each of these problems.

Automated provisioning and deprovisioning

Advanced IAM systems such as Akku help you automate the process of provisioning, de-provisioning, and updation of user access permissions. When employees join or leave, their access rights are automatically updated, reducing the risk of unauthorized access and ensuring compliance.

This means significant amounts of time saved when new employees join your organization or change roles, with the required access permissions assigned with a single click. And when an employee leaves the company, your administrators no longer need to delete the user from each of your applications separately. With one-click deprovisioning, you save time and ensure no access permissions are accidentally left active which could leave the door open to security risks.

Single Sign-On (SSO)

SSO allows employees to access multiple applications with a single set of credentials. This improves their user experience and efficiency, and also enhances security by reducing the number of credentials that your users need to manage, which could potentially become compromised.

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

MFA adds an extra layer of security on top of your password. This is even more important in remote or hybrid operations where you have no way of verifying that the person logging in with a set of credentials is actually a genuine user. MFA goes a long way toward securing your organization’s sensitive data from fraudulent login attempts with stolen user credentials.

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

A comprehensive IAM solution like Akku enables you to enforce role-based access control, ensuring that employees only have access to the information necessary for their roles. RBAC allows you to control what end-users can access by assigning them to roles such as administrator, team lead, executive, or business analyst, for example. Permissions can then be aligned with these roles ensuring job functions can be performed without providing excessive or universal access which opens up security risks.

Secure remote access

When it comes to remote operations, ensuring secure access practices is vital to protect sensitive data and applications. An IAM solution like Akku addresses this in multiple ways.

For example, you can set up an IP-based access restriction to allow access to certain sensitive data only from the office to prevent misuse and ensure security. All other functions can be performed remotely to promote productivity and convenience.

Or access to certain resources can be limited to only whitelisted devices using device-based restriction.

Each user can be limited to access resources relevant to them only during their defined work shift and access can be prevented at other times through time-based restrictions.

And access can even be disabled from other countries to prevent malicious activity originating outside your area of operations through location-based restriction.

Partnering with a service provider such as Akku, which has tailored IAM solutions for the BPO and ITeS industry can help you protect sensitive data and maintain compliance with industry regulations besides enabling streamlined operations and collaboration across departments. Contact Akku today to learn more!

The urgent need for Identity & Access Management at Universities and Educational Institutions

Cyber threats can affect any educational setting, from elementary schools to universities, whether online or brick-and-mortar. Limited resources, budget constraints, outdated software, and inadequate security systems, cause some of the biggest risks.

Education ranks as the fifth most targeted industry for security breaches in the United States, with more than 1600 publicly disclosed cyberattacks on schools between 2016 and 2022. Just last year, a security lapse in India’s Education Ministry app, Diksha, exposed millions of students’ and teachers’ personally identifying information due to an unprotected cloud server storing the data.

With the increasing adoption of technology in education, and even more so after the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for Identity & Access Management (IAM) systems is now vital for security and productivity at educational institutions.

But first, what are the unique challenges in IAM for educational institutions?

Diverse user base

Educational institutions cater to a diverse range of users including students, faculty, staff, administrators, and sometimes even external collaborators. Managing identities and access rights for such a diverse user base can be complex.

Outdated IT systems

Limited IT budgets result in legacy systems that are challenging to maintain, costly to fix, and may lack effective customer service. They also pose security risks due to outdated infrastructure. Users with multiple roles face challenges as each role is treated as a separate ID, leading to multiple credentials and fragmented access.

Remote learning

The rise of remote learning and the prevalence of BYOD or Bring Your Own Device policies have introduced additional difficulties in managing identities and securing access to resources. Educational institutions must ensure secure access to resources from any location and on any device while maintaining data privacy and security.

Data breach risks

Educational institutions handle large amounts of personal and sensitive information, including academic records, personal information, and research data making them prime targets for data breaches. Maintaining data security is essential for building trust and preventing breaches or leaks.

Changing user roles

Colleges and universities frequently onboard and offboard thousands of new users or new students each semester, each of whom require access to university resources before arriving on campus. Also, access for graduating students needs to be disabled promptly. Also, colleges handle transient users on a massive scale, including students taking semesters off and contingent faculty.

Manual provisioning and de-provisioning

Manual provisioning and de-provisioning of user access leads to high costs, security threats, and help desk overload. Manual authorization workflows for user access are prone to delays, mistakes, and compliance/security concerns. IT staff are responsible for frequently authorizing access requests, leading to inefficiencies. Also, there is a lack of auditing.

No integration with cloud-based platforms

Educational institutions face challenges integrating IAM systems with cloud-based platforms. The absence of dedicated IT help desk teams results in an increased workload for IT staff to resolve password and account unlock requests.

How can IAM address these challenges?

Centralized management and access

IAM solutions provide a centralized platform for managing user identities, authentication, and authorization. This helps to streamline user provisioning, de-provisioning, and access management across the institution, reducing administrative overhead.

For users too, with a single sign-on provided by an IAM platform, all applications are brought onto a single platform. This eliminates the hassle of multiple passwords and logins and makes the login process fast and effortless.

Automated provisioning and de-provisioning

A comprehensive IAM solution like Akku automates the process of provisioning and de-provisioning user accounts based on predefined rules and policies.

This ensures users have timely access to resources they need and access is revoked promptly upon role changes or departure from an institution, reducing the risk of unauthorized access. Also, IAM solutions implement role-based access. This granular control ensures users have access only to resources necessary for their job functions.

Learn-from-anywhere security

IAM solutions often go beyond user permissions to access applications. For example, Akku offers extensive access management features that let you permit access to your institution’s resources only from specific whitelisted network IP addresses, or only from whitelisted devices.

Suspicious login attempts can also be identified and flagged when a user attempts to log in from an unfamiliar location or at an unexpected time.

Multi-factor authentication (MFA)

Many IAM solutions offer MFA capabilities, adding an extra layer of security beyond passwords. By requiring users to authenticate using multiple factors such as passwords, biometrics, or one-time codes, MFA helps prevent unauthorized access even if credentials are compromised.

Akku makes implementation of MFA effortless and cost-effective with a range of authentication factors to choose from, including passwordless authentication.

Integration with LMS and other education-specific platforms

IAM solutions integrate with LMS platforms and other applications used in educational settings, which allows for single sign-on (SSO) capabilities, enabling users to access multiple resources with a single set of credentials, thereby enhancing user experience and productivity.

With Akku, the process of integration is effortless with plug-and-play connectors to over 500 popular applications.

Auditing and compliance reporting

An end-to-end IAM solution like Akku provides robust auditing and reporting capabilities, allowing institutions to monitor user activity, track access privileges, and generate compliance reports. Akku’s Smart Analytics dashboard provides clear visibility across the institution’s users as well as intelligent insights on unused application licenses, provisioned user access, and more.

IAM solutions can help educational institutions improve security, streamline administrative processes, and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, enabling a safer learning environment for students and staff. Akku’s IAM solutions are tailored to meet these unique challenges, so reach out to us today so we can help you stay secure.

Data Logging and Audit: The IAM advantage

One of the key functions of an effective Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution is data logging, to capture and store information about which users access what applications, and when. These logs can help to drive effective decision-making through auditing in three key areas – financial, security, and compliance. Here’s how.

Financial audits

Optimization of software licensing is an area where your IAM can play a role in financial auditing.

Through the logs maintained by your IAM, it is possible to extract actionable insights on the actual usage of software licenses that your organization owns, and therefore the number of users actively using each application, and whether there is very low usage of certain applications.

This makes optimization possible by reducing the number of licenses for specific applications if they are in excess, and by dropping or retiring applications that are not being used.

It is important to note that most IAMs will only capture the base data that would feed such audits and analysis, and generally would not provide these insights within the platform. However, if you are working with a highly flexible IAM, such customizations should be possible to implement.

Security audits

Logging user actions can help companies improve security as it is a way for administrators to detect breaches early, and also analyze and provide verifiable evidence of the source of breaches.

An effective IAM solution would maintain detailed logs monitoring all access and activity on the organization’s apps, ensuring that there is no unaccounted access. This provides complete visibility into which users have accessed which applications, and when.

Security auditing verifies whether all documented protocols are being followed and assists in preventing and tracking down malicious activity. To maximize the security benefits of audit logging, logs should be reviewed regularly and often enough to detect security incidents.

Compliance audits

Compliance audits help to ensure the efficiency of compliance programs, to ensure that your organization achieves and maintains certifications and recognized standards, in turn leading to improved customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Your IAM can help to provide verifiable evidence of compliance with security, data protection, and privacy standards and laws. This is achieved through features such as multi-factor authentication and enforcement of strong password policies. Similarly, prompt deprovisioning of user accounts through a single sign-on (SSO) functionality, and dissemination of mandatory employee communications through the common platform of the IAM go a long way towards complying with statutory standards.

Compliance logs are also useful when it comes to following General Data Protection Regulation such as respecting employees’ right to be forgotten.

Are you making the most of the logs captured by your IAM to manage financial, security, and compliance audits at your organization? Unlock the value of your data, and take it even further with customized reporting and dashboards with a highly flexible IAM solution like Akku.

Flexible Identity: IAM solutions need to bend… a little at least!

In the world of Identity and Access Management (IAM), flexibility is the key to stability. While IAMs are not new, the threats that they are helping to protect against and the environment in which they are operating are constantly evolving. Adaptability is more critical than ever.

Negotiating this ever-transforming environment, enterprises need both flexibility and fit in terms of their identity and access management strategy. This means finding an ideal IAM solution that adapts and grows with your business, customers, workforce, tools, processes, and market trends. Your IAM needs to balance user-friendliness and security, or users tend to get frustrated and search for workarounds that can open up security vulnerabilities.

Rushing into a decision about your IAM without a fully-formed strategy can result in a solution that is so rigid it doesn’t solve your problems! An inflexible IAM that does not support your identity and access management needs, can negatively impact user experience and decrease productivity. Technology should enhance security goals, not compromise them. Opt for a flexible IAM solution.

What do we mean by flexibility? It is the ability to use the IAM in the way that you want, without being constrained by its own features.

Flexibility in authentication methods

A flexible IAM offers a wide range of strong and centralized authentication mechanisms that cover cloud and mobile assets, permitting you to set password policies with multiple multifactor authentication (MFA) options. Modern MFA solutions provide users with multiple options depending on the circumstances (for instance, a hard OTP token may be used when working offline). This ensures that while security is the priority, productivity is not compromised.

Flexibility in integration

Your identity provider (IdP) must integrate with your IAM. Identity providers, such as Azure AD, are third-party service providers that store and manage digital identities. Choose the IAM that integrates seamlessly with your IdP, and which integrates with and provides access to a large list of cloud, on-prem, SaaS, licensed, and custom apps. This gives you the flexibility to use any IdP and app, based on the merits, without being tied down by your IAM.

Flexibility in access management

A flexible IAM allows you to define proper access privileges and set custom device restriction rules, in order to balance security with usability. A central directory, for instance, can help to manage access rights by automatically matching employee job titles to locations and relevant privilege levels. Further, a flexible IAM system can be used to establish groups with privileges for specific roles thereby uniformly and securely assigning access rights. By making it easy to define access privileges, your IAM becomes more flexible and user-friendly.

Customization

With IAM solutions, one size does not fit all. Look for a solution that allows you to customize everything from number of users to MFA options to report customization and content restriction. The more you customize the IAM to suit your needs, the better the digital experience your company can provide to its workforce – and the greater the impact on the business and the bottom-line.

Akku is a cloud-based powerful identity and access management solution that is designed with SME/MMEs in mind and their ever-changing needs. Contact us today for a consultation.

Authentication, Authorization, Auditing: the Three Pillars of IAM

In an earlier article, we explored the 3 pillars of a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), with Identity and Access Management (IAM) being one of these pillars. In this blog, we dive deeper into IAM, and the key concepts on which it is built.

2021 saw the average cost of a data breach rising from US$3.86 million to US$4.24 million on an annual basis, according to the IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2021.

Data breaches are increasing. And your Identity and Access Management solution, or IAM, is your first line of defense. IAM secures, measures, monitors, and improves the security of access through a standardized process.

How does an IAM improve security? It offers three pillars of support: Authentication, Authorization, and Auditing.

Authentication

How do you map the correct users to gain access to the correct content, at the correct times?

Authentication takes place whenever a user attempts to access the organization’s network or assets. Verified credentials serve as a passport that allows users to access data, systems, applications, and resources.

With data breaches becoming more common, user authentication is vital to security. Organizations are prioritizing advanced security through sophisticated additional authentication methods. For instance, your IAM would secure your access management with two-factor or multi-factor authentication by pairing a username and password with a key card or OTP token, a fingerprint, or facial recognition. Every user has unique credentials, and IAM authenticates the user data to confirm that the user is a member of the organization.

Using a strong password policy can also improve authentication security. Verifying whether your IAM allows you to configure and customize your password policy is essential in providing a comprehensive authentication process.

Authorization

While authentication verifies the users’ identity, the authorization aspect of IAM is what grants the user access to data based on their identity and defined access rules. While the two are related, they are not interchangeable.

In a sense, authorization is the second step to authentication – think of a night club, where the bouncer allows you entry after checking your ticket stamp (authentication), following which another staffer inside decides if your stamp allows you access to every area of the club or restricts you to select areas (authorization).

In organizations, users are granted authorizations according to their roles. Proper authorization is important to prevent data breaches.

For secure authorization, follow the zero trust principle and provide minimum possible access to each active user and immediately deprovision ex-employees. These two steps ensure that the risk of data breaches caused by improper authorization or disgruntled employees is reduced.

Auditing

Auditing security configurations helps weed out redundancies within the IAM system, such as IAM users, roles, and policies that are not required, and make sure that all users are authorized and authenticated. It also helps secure the system by regularly monitoring who has access to critical enterprise assets.

Audits ensure that compliance requirements are met, incidents are responded to and taken care of within a defined period of time, procedures are streamlined, responsibilities are segregated, transparency and documentation are maintained.

Audits can also help to understand employee or user contributions on a particular app or data sheet. This can also be used in version control. Knowing who last logged on to the document gives usable information in cases where data has been breached.

Chinks in authentication, authorization, or auditing can result in a compromised system. Opt for a trusted IAM solution such as Akku, a major emerging player in the APAC region. Akku offers a plethora of customizable options to improve data security, standards compliance, efficiency, and productivity.

IAM as the Solution to Healthcare Sector Challenges

Healthcare organizations are unique in the volume and sensitivity of information that they hold. Reports say that healthcare is among the 5 most cyber-attacked industries over the past 5 years.

The 2020 Breach Barometer published by Protenus reports that in 2019, more than 41 million patient records were breached, and around 40% of the respondents surveyed in Europe and the U.S. were concerned hackers would breach their digital data.

The importance of bolstering cloud security in such an environment is therefore vital, and deploying an Identity and Access Management (IAM) system can play an important role in this process.

Here is a look at some of the key challenges facing the healthcare sector, and how an IAM could help to overcome them.

#Challenge 1: Enabling easy but secure access

Very often, breaches of patient data occur due to a lack of caution on the part of patients themselves, with the use of easily compromised passwords. This applies equally to healthcare providers too, with the need to access multiple applications, and therefore, the need to memorize multiple passwords.

The IAM Solution:

Enforcing a strong password policy can help ensure that patients and providers alike set strong passwords that are more difficult to breach. Additionally, by enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA), an additional layer of security is added above the password. And to make things easier for providers, bringing all applications onto a single platform to provide them with a single point of access means that just one set of credentials is all that they need to remember.

# Challenge 2: Compliance with regulations

Healthcare is a highly monitored industry and there are certain established regulations to follow. For instance, in the USA you have the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), as well as newer industry-specific regulations like Electronic Prescribing for Controlled Substances (EPCS), for which compliance is non-negotiable.

These newer regulations call for adherence to certain prescribed standards of data security along with detailed audit capabilities.

The IAM Solution:

With an appropriate IAM solution, compliance requirements can be largely met through strong data encryption, implementing standards-compliant password policies across users, providing only the minimum necessary access to users, and comprehensive logging of every user action across applications and data points.

# Challenge 3: Driving digital transformation

COVID-19 has accelerated the speed of digital transformation, with the healthcare sector right at the center of the revolution. Telemedicine, Patient Access Management, and a host of other new requirements, each need control over a number of identities and access entitlements.

The healthcare industry is under growing pressure to adapt to changing business models and technology innovation, as there is an ever-increasing need to protect access to sensitive data.

The IAM Solution:

With features like single sign-on, IAM offers an integrated approach to patient care, enforcing security and compliance capabilities to increase efficiency. In order to support the new digital-first world of healthcare, therefore, IAM has become a necessity rather than an add-on.

Clearly, IAM is the need of the hour in the healthcare industry. And Akku, the powerful and flexible enterprise cloud control solution created by CloudNow helps to facilitate identity and access management across your healthcare enterprise’s cloud environment. Talk to us today to discuss how Akku may be able to help with your compliance requirements.