Just last year, the popular Q&A site Quora suffered a data breach, as reported by Techworld in their article on UK’s most infamous data breaches. This just goes to show that even the best of businesses are finding it a challenge to secure their data and vital business information in this age of digital advancements.
IT security is, no doubt, an overwhelming, daunting, and expensive task. With cybercriminals getting more advanced and sophisticated, organizations are struggling to find security solutions that will effectively counter them.Continue reading How Technology Can Simplify IT Security
For organizations, it is crucial to ensure data security and, therefore, IAM has become a crucial part of every network security effort. Identity and access management at the organization-level – mostly include IAM solutions for enterprise applications used by organizations to authenticate and validate employees and a relatively small number of users. But how different is the situation with B2C businesses and other organizations who have huge numbers of internal and external users using their online services every day?Continue reading Customer Identity and Access Management – How is it different from IAM?
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!
Data protection and data privacy are so closely linked that people (and sometimes even organizations) tend to think of them as synonyms. However, understanding the difference between the two is crucial to ensuring that both protection and privacy are maintained.Continue reading Data Protection & Data Privacy – A difference that matters
Technology users today are spoilt for choice when it comes to the types of devices and the variety of platforms through which they can stay connected to work and social groups. They can access their accounts from simply anywhere and at any time, as long as they can authenticate their identities.
However, the process of authentication as we know it has remained largely static – the user provides the system with their credentials at the time of access, the system matches it against its database of user data and provides the user access to the network on successfully validating their credentials.
Continuous authentication brings in a new approach to network security, and the reception it has received goes to show the importance companies attach to their security today. Continuous authentication can help your organization protect itself from ‘session imposters’ who try to take over sessions which are open even after the employee is done using them. It also helps you protect your network from credential stuffing attacks and phishing.
What is Continuous Authentication?
In continuous authentication, users are rated based on ‘authentication scores’ which aim to determine, based on user behavior, if the user is actually who he/she is claiming to be. With advanced algorithms which are fast becoming smart enough to understand human behavior, networks can essentially monitor user behavior to determine a user’s authenticity.
For example, in a banking application, if the security solution detects an anomaly in user behavior, it can prompt a logout or request for additional information like fingerprint or password to ensure that the account is used only by the designated person.
Continuous authentication has become powerful enough to analyze information from the various sensors of smartphones and other devices to monitor the pressure on the keypad, the amount of time being spent on an application etc.
With certain continuous authentication solutions, organizations can also assign restrictions based on tolerable risk by specifying the minimum confidence score and factors like a user’s location or time of the access request.
When you implement a continuous authentication solution, think in terms of acceptable risk and context – certain applications in your network might need lower authentication scores than other, more critical, applications.
While planning to deploy a continuous authentication system, it is also important to ensure that it is compatible with your existing security solution and covers all the areas of your organization’s network.
We understand that cybersecurity is becoming more fluid and security solutions are becoming more powerful and customizable. Akku’s DNS filtering and geolocation features can be used to score your users, and this information can be used to continuously authenticate them. To know more about how we can help you, get in touch with us now.
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.
Single Sign-on
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.
Multi-factor Authentication (MFA)
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.
Content Filtering
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.
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.
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.
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
Privileged Identity Management (PIM) refers to the control and monitoring of access and activity involving privileged user identities within an organization. Privileged identities include those of superusers or super control users such as Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Chief Information Officer (CIO), Database Administrator (DBA), and other top management officials.
Usually, such accounts are given access to all applications and data within an organization, along with the highest levels of permissions. However, many times, such unlimited access has been the cause for data breaches. When an organization’s data is compromised from a privileged user or their account, it is known as Privilege Abuse or Privileged User Abuse.Continue reading A How-to Guide to Privileged Identity Management
Advanced Server Access is a relatively new aspect of identity and access management system for the cloud. In fact, it fits better under the umbrella of privileged access management (PAM). PAM is built on top of IdPs and ADs, which are crucial for identity and access management for on-prem networks. By being used in conjunction with ADs, PAM has been able to successfully provide enhanced control over identity for administrators and other privileged users.
What is PAM?
Privileged access management helps to secure and control privileged access to critical assets on an on-premise network. With PAM, the credentials of admin accounts are placed inside a virtual vault to isolate the accounts from any risk. Once the credentials are placed in the repository, admins are required to go through the PAM system every time they need access to the critical areas of a network. For every single login, their footprint is logged and authenticated. After every cycle, the credentials are reset, ensuring that admins have to create a new log for every access request. Continue reading What is advanced server access?
Privilege abuse – that is the security threat that your business’s IT team is most worried about. According to a survey conducted in March 2014 among more than 4000 IT security executives, over 88% of them fear that users who have access to the organization’s applications and data are the ones who are most likely to compromise it and lead to a security breach.
Privilege abuse, or privileged user abuse, refers to the inappropriate or fraudulent use of permitted access to applications and data. This could be done, either maliciously, accidentally or through ignorance of policies. In addition to causing financial losses, such insider breaches also damage the organization’s reputation, sometimes irreparably.
