One of the biggest benefits of cloud computing is the level of accessibility it enables – from anywhere, and at any time. However, it is important to set up certain restrictions in order to protect your sensitive applications and privileged user accounts from being compromised.
One such important security measure involves setting up a device policy within your organization. Continue reading Enforce Device-based Restrictions with Akku
The employee lifecycle is an HR model that identifies the different stages an employee goes through during his/her stint at an organization. Employee lifecycle management, therefore, involves the steps taken by HR in optimizing the flow of the cycle. Typically, the employee lifecycle involves the following stages: recruiting, onboarding, training and development, retention, and offboarding.
In modern organizations, where the employee is also a user (of one or more applications), a similar user lifecycle begins at the onboarding stage and continues until the employee exits the organization.
When it comes to the efforts involved in the user lifecycle management, both the HR and the IT teams have roles to play. The process involves creating user accounts and user roles, assigning permissions, setting up custom restrictions, continually monitoring user activity, modifying user roles, keeping employees compliant, disseminating mandatory and relevant training material, and finally, removing access when they offboard.
Here’s how Akku can make user lifecycle management easy for you:
Onboarding
With Akku’s single sign-on admin dashboard, multiple user accounts to different applications can be created and assigned to a single set of credentials for the user, all in a few clicks. Through this dashboard, user roles and permissions can also be assigned easily, saving time and improving efficiency at the onboarding stage.
With Akku for user lifecycle management, the organization can ensure user account provisioning on the employee’s very first day at the organization so that new employees can hit the ground running.
User Management & Usage Analytics
Akku provides administrators with granular control over user access to data and apps. When employees are promoted or moved internally within the organization to newer roles, it only takes minutes to reassign permissions to existing apps or add new apps into the employee’s kitty.
By checking a user’s real time access and use of each assigned application, Akku also helps to reassign permissions or remove accounts that may not be necessary for a particular user. Akku also allows IT to more easily conduct audits by keeping an audit trail in reports that specify when users were provided or revoked certain levels of access and who has assigned these permissions.
Compliance & Communication Management
Akku enables you to keep your users updated, well trained and compliant through effective communication with its Internal Communication feature. Through this feature, HR and IT administrators can share information and updates, either addressing them to all users within the organization or with specific departments alone. The same feature can also be used to disseminate training material to upskill and qualify users for a future-ready workforce.
Not only does Akku help in disseminating information and training material, it also allows for tracking user viewing and consumption of these communications.
Deprovisioning
During the course of an employee’s stay at the organization, he/she may have accessed and used different corporate applications. When the employee leaves the organization, it is critical to revoke access to all of those applications promptly. If this activity is missed, even for a single account in a single application, the organization is risking compromise and misuse of organizational data.
With Akku’s single sign-on dashboard offering a complete and comprehensive view of all accounts and applications accessed by a user, deprovisioning of access to all of them is only clicks away.
Akku offers a comprehensive solution to corporate identity lifecycle management. To know more about the features and applications of Akku, get in touch with us today!
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has been effective in the USA since 1996.
The Act actually has five different section titles, namely Health Insurance Reform, Administrative Simplification, Tax-Related Health Provisions, Application and Enforcement of Group Health Plan Requirements, and Revenue Offsets – however, the mention of ‘HIPAA Compliance’ most often refers to compliance to the second title – Administration Simplification.
This is the most challenging aspect of the HIPAA Act, as it comes with strict regulations on protecting the data of patients in an industry that is often a major target for data breaches and malicious activity. Identity and access management across applications used in a healthcare facility, therefore, becomes critical to HIPAA compliance.
Here’s how Akku can help in ensuring data privacy and preventing both outsider and insider attacks on patient data, and, ultimately, compliance to HIPAA’s stringent regulations.
In addition to helping your healthcare facility become HIPAA compliant, Akku also makes it easy to set up integrations across your Hospital Information System (HIS), Lab Information System (LIS), Patient Management System (PMS) and more. This, in turn, improves collaboration between various departments and enhances overall productivity.
To know more about Akku’s complete set of features and their specific benefits to your facility, contact us today!
Akku and Okta are both highly efficient cloud security solutions that strive to help companies manage and secure user authentication on applications in their network, and to transform their customer experiences. Here are a few key differences between the features of Akku and Okta.
Akku’s requires only a one-click login for universal login access for all applications. This ensures both high security and productivity.
Okta’s one-click authentication has made user login process 50 times faster. This user-friendly and customizable feature uses OTP to access to 5,500 pre-installed applications, ensuring direct navigation.
Akku’s MFA is simple, inexpensive, and easy-to-use. It provides multiple layers of security to the sign-in process using Time-based OTP (TOTP) and push notification. The former generates passwords every 30 seconds while the latter generates notifications to authorize login attempts.
Okta’s MFA is secure, simple, and intelligent. It verifies access using user’s knowledge, possession, and biometric factors instead of passwords. It also generates security questions, OTPs, and push notifications for a user’s authentication.
Akku offers a customizable content filtering feature that ensures high productivity across your organization while improving network security. This functionality prevents employees from accessing and browsing irrelevant websites during office hours and prevents distractions and aids in providing secure network access.
Akku prevents your employees from accessing irrelevant YouTube videos which can affect employee productivity and blacklists their personal email id from being accessed using your network or systems.
Okta, unlike Akku, does not provide any content filtering features.
While providing access to users anytime from anywhere is necessary, it is important to make sure that this feature does not compromise on security. With Akku’s time- and location-based restriction feature, security will always be on guard to restrict unusual user activities. It also restricts access to your network from specific geo-locations to prevent potential security breaches.
Okta does not offer standard products that provide time- and location-based restriction capabilities.
Through this feature, Akku allows you to set a minimum requirement for password standardization. This prevents anyone in your organization from possibly setting weak or easy-to-hack passwords. This also allows for password consistency across your organization.
Okta comes with a password policy standardizer which is similar to Akku’s.
This feature ensures end-to-end communication between the management and the employees. This feature sends push notifications to the employees for each announcement. These notifications appear as soon as a user logs in, to ensure he does not miss any information. To ensure a response from the employee’s side, it restricts action until he has read and replied to the message. This also helps you in ensuring standards compliance across your organization without any gaps.
Okta does not have a well-structured internal communications system like that of Akku.
Akku, a product by CloudNow Technologies, is a robust identity and access management solution that helps improve data security and productivity and ensures transparency and control in tandem. For the modern organization, it is crucial to maximize security, compliance and productivity across your organization and Akku’s features are specifically built around that purpose. Contact us today to know more about how Akku can help you secure your network.
All the information presented in this article is accurate as of May 5th, 2019.
The AD connector which comes with Akku, allows organizations to use either their on-prem AD or Azure AD as the data source for authentication. Akku’s AD is agentless, which means that no additional software is installed in the client environment. Continue reading Akku’s Agentless AD Connector For Improved Security
If your organization relies on the cloud for a majority of its operations, you may want to look closer at the type of architecture your security solution uses – whether it is agent-based or agentless. While some might say that it is irrelevant and that you should focus only on the security solution’s efficiency, we beg to differ. Picking the right kind of cloud security solution can drastically affect your organization’s day-to-day operations and how much ownership you can take over the security solution. Continue reading Agent-based Cloud Security Solution? No thanks!
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is one of the most highly recommended security measures in this age of brute-force attacks, data breaches and other such cyber attacks. And while some off-the-shelf SaaS applications may already come with a built-in MFA feature, when it comes to a custom-built application or website, businesses have to make the tough decision between reinforced security and the high cost at which it comes.
Continue reading To Implement or Ignore: MFA for Custom Apps & Websites
