How to select your IAM service provider

Given the increasing number of cyber-attacks, greater adoption of Cloud Services, and swelling mobile workforce, it’s little wonder that IAM has been gaining recognition as a key technology platform at the forefront of the digital world. 

At the same time, IAM is almost never one-size-fits-all, and so choosing the right solution provider is important. Your IAM needs to work at scale, efficiently, and seamlessly. It also needs to be cyber-attack-proof as well as future-proof.

There are several IAM providers in the market, with more continuing to enter the fray. And why not, considering the global identity and access management (IAM) market size is projected to reach USD 24.76 billion by 2026.

So, how do you know which identity and access management solution is right for your organization? Here are some important factors to consider…

Credentials

What you need is a proven solution, one that can scale and perform. At the same time, if you are not a large enterprise yourself, the large enterprise IAM platforms on the market may prove to be financially unviable.

There are IAM platforms that offer most of the same functionalities at SME-friendly costs. To evaluate these solutions, get information on the following factors to see if you are on the right track:

  • Customer references or testimonials
  • Age of the business. How long has your vendor been around?
  • Any data they may have on product testing, performance tests, security tests, and so on
  • Policy controls regarding data access governance, adaptive authentication, and so on
  • Number of similar projects done as well as case studies. You need to align with an IAM vendor that shares your direction

Identifying an established and well-regarded smaller service provider can be a great way to build the capabilities you need without breaking the bank.

Technical expertise

Deploying an IAM solution is rarely a simple plug and play process. Today, most organizations – whether large enterprises or SMEs – use a range of applications, both cloud-based and on-premise. Integration and deployment support therefore need to be key factors in your selection process. While you yourself may not be fully technically aware, here are some questions you need to ask:

  • Does the IAM’s SSO support all of your current and planned apps? Does it come with pre-built connectors for SaaS applications? Also ask about integration kits, token translation capabilities, and support for a range of industry standards.
  • How does your vendor plan to monitor, track, delegate, revoke, suspend or integrate access across applications?
  • Does your vendor have on-prem deployment options while offering flexibility to sync data from heterogeneous data?
  • What approach does your vendor use to handle the migration from a legacy system?
  • What multi-factor authentication options are supported and can they be accessed via APIs, SDKs, or both? Ask about the types of MFA supported — use of mobile devices, push notifications, SMS, and so on. The MFA options need to balance security and user experience.
  • What range of authorization and access policy controls does it provide?

And finally, are you and the vendor the right fit?

You must align with an IAM vendor that shares your direction. Particularly as a small or mid-sized business partnering with a small or niche vendor, you need to both share the same roadmap so that the journey together is smooth. 

Also, before you select a vendor, ask yourself how much technical help you require – do you possess enough internal technical capabilities to deploy an IAM solution on your own? What about post-deployment tech support?

Here are more questions to have answered so you are the right fit. 

  • How customizable is the solution? Can it meet your tech needs today and tomorrow?
  • Is the authentication policy adaptable? It needs to be because a one-size-fits-all authentication can hinder user productivity, experience, and so on. A customized solution is what you are looking for.
  • Are the authentication policies adaptive and scalable? (Do read our previous article on Alternatives to Okta for more)
  • What plans does your vendor have for large-scale deployments and product performance? How are they adapting to emerging standards considering the industry is evolving rapidly?
  • Most importantly, does the IAM vendor’s long-term strategy align with your objectives?

Akku specializes in creating solutions tailor-made for the needs of small and medium-sized businesses. Call us today if you want IAM solutions that best fit your enterprise needs.

Can an IAM solution prevent Credential Phishing?

The most common misconception regarding credential phishing is that it is people-driven and not organization-driven. Therefore, organizations tend to underestimate the impact it can have on them if even one of their employees is a victim of credential phishing. We suggest reviewing your entire security strategy to ensure that you are protected against phishing. 

Here is everything you need to know about credential phishing attacks.

Continue reading Can an IAM solution prevent Credential Phishing?

Prevent Cybercrime with the Zero Trust Model of Cybersecurity

Would you trust just anyone to enter your home? Or would you first confirm that you know them and they have the right to be there?

The Zero Trust Model (ZTM) of security follows a similar principle. The ZTM approach is to be aware of anything entering the company, whether from inside or outside the company’s perimeter.

ZTM simply verifies everything that requires access to the system. The approach does not necessarily decree that every request should be denied. Instead, it asks: Why is access needed? How far? How long?

According to Cyber Security Ventures, cybercrime damages will top $6 trillion by 2021. Little surprise that cybercrime is the trending topic today! This may be just a prediction, but an ominous one indeed. It is a great challenge to prevent cybercrime and avoid this predicted damage. However, we can certainly overcome some part of this. We just need to take the right steps to protect ourselves.

The Zero Trust approach depends on different technology and governance processes to achieve their goals. This model mainly focuses on improving the security of the IT environment of enterprises. This approach varies based on who (the User) is accessing what (SaaS or In-house Applications), as well as from where (Location or IP), how long (Time Restriction) and how (granularity) they want to access it.

There are multiple ways an organization can adopt the Zero Trust Model, and one of the best way to do so is to integrate with an IAM. For example, a well-designed application supports IAM integration and provides MFA by default. Today, all applications have begun to adopt the Zero Trust Model at the design level itself.

Cloud Security 101: Identity and Access Management

An Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution allows organizations to manage user access to critical data. It is an intermediate layer between your users and your applications/data.

Deploying an IAM solution a proven way to improve network security in an organization. A good IAM solution should also reduce the time spent by your IT team to grant access for individual applications, thereby improving architectural simplicity and reducing the load on your servers. This also means that your users have to remember only one set of credentials to access several applications in your on-premise or cloud network.

What should you expect from a good IAM solution?

Streamlined User Access

An effective IAM solution should greatly reduce hassle by providing a slick and time efficient method to validate users. It should be able to do this without compromising on security, allowing only legitimate users to access your network from on-premise or remote systems.

Conventionally, at organizations that have numerous applications on their network, users need to remember multiple sets of credentials, which is inconvenient, but more secure. An effective IAM solution should be able to strike the right balance between the two extremes of convenience and security.

With a single set of user credentials to access all permitted applications and data, memorizing multiple credentials is avoided, improving productivity and ease of use.

Improved Security

Another important feature you should look out for is the ability to control user access to your network. This is typically delivered through device- and IP-based restrictions, which give you the ability to provide access only from specific devices or IP addresses to your network. In addition to simply whitelisting specific requests, an IAM solution should also be able to permanently block illegal access from blacklisted devices and IPs.

Seamless Admin Control

An identity and access management solution should give the administrators of your network a simple and intuitive dashboard with all the controls needed to secure your network and manage access across it. This can go a long way in reducing the cost and time for your IT team.

This includes managing creating and removing user accounts, as well as controlling the level of access provided to each individual user.

Identity and Access Management by Akku

Akku by CloudNow is a state-of-the-art Identity and Access Management solution for all your user management needs. Its powerful SSO function simplifies user identity and access management, IP- and device-based restrictions prevent unwarranted access, multi-factor authentication reinforces security, and a range of other versatile features put you in complete control of your network. Get in touch with us now to know more!

Does your IAM solution really need an Agent?

Most IAM tools utilize browser extensions or applications installed on the end-user’s machine, or on an Active Directory, for access to identity. But why?! A user can be identified even without an agent – so having an so-called ‘lightweight agent’ sitting in your Active Directory itself is not the most secure way to manage user identity.

Whenever you create a dependency to achieve a particular solution, it is important to ensure the solution is 100% secure and that applies for the dependencies (Agents) too. This could make the architecture slightly complicated, depending on how it works.

Another important factor against the use of an Agent-based architecture is that  you have to trust the Agent not to exceed its scope. This is very important because even many of the applications and services that we trust these days are not actually secure, and many act beyond their scope. For example, as per Digital Content Next, even the big boy of the tech industry, Google, still collects user location information even after turning off location settings.

So the big question is, when the things can be done without an agent, then why use an agent at all? People say it is for efficiency, and may be they are right. But is this worth the compromise on transparency and security?

Is Your Data Secure? No…

As per a survey by Forrester Research (Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Paper, February 2017), in the last 4 years, out of every three organizations, two have had an average of at least 5 breaches. There are nearly 6 billion data records that were stolen and lost in the past 10 years. According to www.breachlevelindex.com, an average of 165,000 records are compromised every hour. According to this article published on www.csoonline.com, global cybercrime related damage is expected to exceed US$ 6 trillion annually by the year 2021.

How can IAM help protect data?

  • Identification: Users make their claim on their identity by entering a username and verify through an authentication process
  • Authentication: Authentication may be a password or may rely on advanced technologies, such as biometric and token-based authentication
  • Authorization: The IAM system must then verify the user’s authorization to perform the requested activity and also ensure that users perform actions only within their scope of authority

Together, these three processes combine to ensure that specified users have the access they need to do their jobs, while unauthorized users are kept away from sensitive resources and information. Effective IAM solutions help enterprises facilitate secure, efficient access to technology resources across these diverse systems.

Identity and Access Management (IAM) is the information security discipline that allows users access to appropriate technology resources, at the right time. It incorporates three major concepts:

According to this article on BizTech magazine, improved data security is one of the three main reasons to deploy an IAM solution.

The article highlights the fact that consolidating authentication and authorization functionality on a single platform provides IT professionals with a consistent method for managing user access. And when a user leaves an organization, IT administrators may revoke their access in the centralized IAM solution with the confidence that this revocation will immediately take effect across all of the technology platforms integrated with that IAM platform.

So implement an identity and access management solution at your organization to take a major step towards improved data security.

Password Security Threats

Most people use a Password Manager to save their account passwords. A password manager is an app or device which serves as a single collection point for all of a user’s account credentials. LastPass and Dashlane are two well-known password managers in the market. The usage of a password manager presents a security risk in case of a data breach. In fact, as per the Independent, the password manager LastPass was hacked and a data breach did occur, compromising user credentials.

Another high-risk method that many users follow is to save their passwords in their browsers, and use auto-fill for convenience.

In today’s world, data breaches are the highest level of threat – don’t forget, all your data is being protected by your passwords! No security initiative can come with 100% convenience – but it is important to understand and prioritize security.

This is even more important for enterprises, where the tools they are providing their users to manage their passwords are eventually protecting the company’s data.

There are enterprise IAM tools available in the market which help enterprises to provide a secure single sign-on (SSO) and other access control lists such as IP- and device restrictions, time and location restrictions, and multi-factor authentication. These functionalities help end users as well as administrators to protect company data with additional layers of protection.

Delving deeper into MFA as a means to improve password security, the trend today is that many leading SaaS providers have started deprecating SMS as the medium to send the OTP, since this is an old-school method and comes with dependencies in order to serve its purpose. The modern and more convenient way to run an MFA is using TOTP and push notification.

Implementing a single sign-on (SSO) with an MFA is a powerful way to boost the security of your passwords while ensuring a minimal compromise on the convenience front. And of course, type your password each time instead of saving it in your browser or a password manager to minimize the security risk.

Protecting Your Vault: Safeguard your Data Center with an IAM Solution

At most enterprises, data centers are a repository of information contained within a network of servers from where data is transmitted to other touch points for processing. While these data centers could be cloud-based or on-premise, the security of such business-critical data is of paramount importance.

There could be several vulnerabilities in your network in the form of entry points that seem like they can be ignored. While there are several measures you can implement to physically secure your data center, it takes a lot more to secure remote or even on-premise servers from virtual attacks. An effective data center security solution will allow you to intuitively monitor all the entry points for possible attacks and ensure that you are protected against any breach.

One major part of the solution is the implementation of an Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution as part of your security system.

Staying Protected Online using an Identity and Access Management Solution

The two biggest focus areas for any security solution are authentication and authorization. Although there are overlaps in the usage of the two terms, there are distinct in the way they allow access of data.

Authentication determines if the user trying to enter a system is in fact who he/she is claiming to be, while authorization determines whether the user has the permission to access the data or application that he/she is attempting to access.

A comprehensive IAM solution should be able to intelligently allow you to do both by acting as the Identity Provider (IdP) for your cloud, on-premise or hybrid network and interact with the servers in the data centers to check for authentication and authorization using advanced, yet easy to implement, system architectures.

The Akku Solution

CloudNow’s Akku is an enterprise-grade IAM solution that plays this role perfectly using its custom SAML to provide a robust Single Sign-on (SSO) solution, or to integrate with an SSO solution already in place for your other applications. As an IdP, Akku communicates with the server at the time of login to carry out authentication and validate authorization.

By using a high-end security solution, you can effectively control access to your network and data center and reduce the number of resources dedicated to data center security.

Akku also removes any need for any middleware which could otherwise complicate or even corrupt the security system.

The implementation of an efficient and cost-effective security solution like Akku can go a long way in allowing you to focus on improving the operational efficiency of your organization instead of being caught up with the security threats to your data.

Permit Access only from Approved Devices and Whitelisted IPs!

Allowing your users to access your official data from anywhere and at any time sounds like a great idea! They can complete their work even when they are on the move by accessing your company’s cloud-based applications. So, why should we restrict access when it has all these pros?

When you permit unshackled access to your company’s applications from any location and device then you also expose your company’s sensitive data and apps to the risk of security or privacy breaches. The possibility of unauthorized access to your sensitive data is a major concern for any company using cloud-based applications.

Why do you need IP restriction?

IP-based access restriction is a great way to secure and protect your mission-critical business data outside your LAN by preventing access to your apps from any IP addresses other than your trusted whitelisted IP ranges.

How does IP-based restriction work?

An IAM solution offering IP-based restriction uses a customized SAML API and integrates with your cloud-based applications. That way, identity management is brought into a common platform across all service providers, with the IAM solution acting as the identity provider. With the identity provider enabling one point control, it is possible to restrict access to your applications only from permitted locations, regulations and IP addresses.

Why restrict based on device?

Device-based access restriction allows you to allow access for specific users only from authorized devices, to prevent misuse or loss of data – that way, users cannot access applications from devices that have not been approved for their use, and unauthorized people cannot access data from devices that may have been approved for other users.

How does device-based restriction work?

With many IAM solutions, device-based restriction is applied through the use of plugins – however more advanced solutions make use of a certificate-based authentication method which has the major advantage of being tamper proof.

A secure certificate-based authentication is completely platform and browser independent and enables cloud administrators to provide or revoke access to SaaS based applications only from specific devices, even when they are outside the office network. Restricting access based on device helps to minimize data breaches and provides the right access to the right people.

Akku offers an IP and device based access restriction feature to help ensure that your data is secure and well protected.