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.
Identity theft is as real as your identity and as dangerous as the one who steals it. It occurs when an unauthorized person or entity uses your personal information to assume your identity and commit fraud and other criminal activities including stealing from you, or from others in your name.
What does an identity thief steal?
Your name, address, credit card or bank account information, and even information that might otherwise seem harmless, such as photographs, information about your family members or your date of birth could be used in harmful ways in the wrong hands.
How does identity theft happen?
Identity thieves are well-organized, tech-savvy, creative and have seemingly innocent online personalities. They can steal information, simply by requesting it from an unassuming person or by using technological attacks to capture millions of records from enterprises. Sometimes, a stolen wallet or a carelessly-thrown receipt or letter can also lead to identity theft.
Here are some of the ways in which an identity theft may take place in your organization:
Data Breaches
A data breach, accidental or malicious, can have a heavy cost on both the organization involved and the individuals whose data is compromised.
Improper security on company-owned devices or devices that have access to your organization’s data is one of the leading causes of data breaches that lead to identity theft.
Phishing
Phishing involves sending deceptive emails with links to malicious websites that may either request or steal your information. If one of your employees is manipulated by such an email and clicks on a link it provides, it can be dangerous to the organization itself.
Even if your organization’s email can manage to keep out such mails from employee inboxes, if your employee has access to their personal email at the workplace, they are at the risk of being compromised.
Public Wi-Fi Connections
One of the problems with allowing your employees to work remotely is the possibility that they may be working from places that offer open or free public wireless internet connectivity. A criminal who also has access to the same network could also be able to observe all of your employee’s activities.
Mishandled Passwords
Carelessness with passwords, whether in terms of the creation of weak passwords or the way they are stored, can make your employees and your organization susceptible to identity theft.
When it comes to preventing identity theft, the first step to take is to sensitize your employees on the different ways in which it can happen. Studies have proven that employees are the preferred channels that identity thieves use when they target organizations.
From your end, you also need to:
Set a strong password policy across your enterprise applications, to ensure that your organization is not compromised through your employees’ use of weak passwords
Use two-factor authentication or multi-factor authentication to enhance the security of applications carrying sensitive data
Ensure that your DNS filter works effectively to block out malicious websites that your employees may try to access
Block access to employees’ personal emails at work, so that there a lesser chance of data compromise and data breaches through phishing
Set up IP-based or device-based restrictions so that unauthorized persons are kept out of your applications when they try to access them from unsafe locations or unrecognized devices
An identity and access management solution (IAM) like Akku can help you take control of all the preventive methods listed above, all in one go.
Get in touch with us through sales@akku.work if you wish to know more about how Akku can help protect your organization from identity theft through identity/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!
Apart from data security, data privacy represents a major area of concern in IT security today. When it comes to data privacy, all organizations are very particular about where and how their company data is being saved, and who has access to it.
This is also related to one of the major reasons why organizations still hesitate to move their data to the cloud – “who else has access to my data if I move to cloud?” Even though almost every IaaS and PaaS provider tries to build confidence in their clients through certifications by authorized agencies, many enterprises are still not convinced. The reason is that there are still areas that lack transparency, where details on their data privacy are not clearly explained and conveyed to them.
To make things more complicated, in many cases, “backdoors” are being legalized by governments!
An effective identity and access management (IAM) solution plays a major role in data privacy and security and could go a long way in addressing the concerns that many businesses have. However, when it comes to IAM, most of the tools do not provide a dedicated server for each of their clients. While it is a fact that a dedicated server tends to cost more when it comes to pricing to the service provider, it is definitely the best way to provide 100% visibility to the client on their company data.
When a dedicated server is assigned to a client, it is possible to share server access between the client and service provider – the service provider cannot login without the client’s knowledge, and the client cannot login without the service provider’s knowledge. This may present some practical difficulties, but it is the only way to give a client 100% confidence that their data is truly under their control.
While it is true that all models have their own advantages and disadvantages, the use of a dedicated server for each client is clearly the best solution in terms of visibility and transparency, with minimal practical difficulty.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) IAM comes as a free service that is available by default to all users of the Google Cloud Platform. GCP IAM is Google’s identity management console, enabling administrators of organizations to manage access and permissions provided to employees across the range of applications and resources that come as part of the Google Cloud Platform. The main function of the IAM is to grant specific users/roles with access to specific GCP resources and prevent unwanted access to other resources. The fundamental building block of GCP IAM is an IAM Policy which answers the question of who (identity) has what access (role) to which data or applications (resource). This IAM Policy is made up of permissions, bundled into roles and matched by identities.
Let’s take a closer look at the concepts of identity, role, and resource as defined by GCP IAM, which make it a useful IAM solution.
Identity
A user’s identity can be accounted for through their Google account (assigned to an individual), Service account (assigned to a service related to the user’s role), a Google group (which can contain more than one Google/Service account), or a G Suite domain name (consisting of all G Suite accounts under a particular domain) or Cloud Identity domain (consisting of all G suite accounts under a particular organization) name.
Role
A role is a combination of permissions assigned to an identity. Traditionally, Google had what are now known as Primitive Roles – which were a standard set of 3 – namely, ‘Owner’, ‘Editor’ and or ‘Viewer’. However, in GCP IAM, Google has gone not one but two steps further – with Predefined Roles and Custom Roles – in allowing administrators a wider range of options when it comes to assigning roles (and therefore, access to do less or more) to the organization’s resources. With what are known as Predefined Roles, granular separation of duties, such as Instance Admin and Network Admin to name a few, is made possible. Custom Roles, as the name suggests, are roles which administrators can customize based on the organization’s needs.
Resource
As defined by Google, “resources are the fundamental components that make up all GCP services”, and include Cloud Pub/Sub topics, Compute Engine Virtual Machines, Cloud Storage Buckets, and App Engine Instances. These resources can then be grouped into projects. Administrators can assign permissions based on different roles to identities in their organization in order to provide them with access to specific resources. On the other hand, they can also provide access to projects, which will then provide users with access to all resources under the project. In the GCP hierarchy, a group of projects can also be placed under a team, teams can be placed under a department and departments can be placed under the organization. Administrators can decide the level of access they wish to give each user based on this hierarchy.
GCP IAM is great, but….
Despite the extensive control it provides to administrators, and the numerous possibilities in authorizing user access, GCP IAM has one downside.
Organizations today utilize a wide range of applications, not all of them being GCP resources. They may use a combination of resources from Amazon Web Services, IBM or Azure, to name a few, and GCP IAM does not support identity and access management on these resources. Its lack of capability to connect with on-prem identity providers such as Microsoft Active Directory and OpenLDAP is another major roadblock.
Looking for one IAM to manage them all? Try Akku, one of the best identity and access management solutions from CloudNow, that can help you manage identities across your on-premise and cloud-based applications seamlessly!
Akku is a great way to control and authenticate communication channels for any enterprise.
One of the biggest threats to any organization is the possibility of a data breach, which can result in loss of data, loss of trust, and ultimately, loss of growth of the business. This makes data security a critical aspect to consider in any enterprise.
An important consideration, especially for SME businesses, is to secure their data – most companies still look for a way to do it in the traditional approach to data security – with an on-premise local environment.
Running the organization with an on-premise environment requires a dedicated workforce, this can be replaced with a secure cloud-based environment. But how does this fit in with Akku? Akku is a pure cloud Identity and Access Management solution that can be integrated with cloud, hybrid or on-prem applications.
So how can Akku help your organization?
Akku’s first great feature would be its Single Sign-on (SSO), where any enterprise’s user accounts and applications can be integrated into a single platform – making access easy for users and control easy for admins.
Unauthorized access is restricted by Akku, which is built on a certificate-based authentication architecture.
It is also possible to filter the content accessed by an organization’s users – DNS filtering to control websites that can be accessed, YouTube filtering to ensure only relevant video content is viewed, and even personal email blocking to improve productivity and security.
Akku also maintains highly granular logs, allowing for detailed reporting on user behavior – time, location, OS and so on for users logging in.
These are just a few of the functionalities that Akku brings to the table to add value to your organization’s data security.
So fight back against data breaches, and tell the world “My Data and Communication are secure!”
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.
Logging on to different applications using different user credentials every single time is frustrating, isn’t it? The use of a Single Sign On (SSO) application makes it easy to access all your applications with just a single set of login credentials. The SSO acts as the identity provider – a common platform to handle user identity and access across all your applications – and also provides authentication, authorization and access control.
Single Sign On solution offers a secure and convenient way to manage access credentials and user provisioning.
Advantages of Single Sign On (SSO)
Reduce Your Help Desk Costs
Gartner’s research says that about 50% of all calls made to help desks are requests for resetting passwords. In this scenario, deploying a Single Sign On application reduces the time, effort and cost spent by your help desk, resulting in savings for your organization.
User Experience
Through automated login using Single Sign On, users can switch between applications without having to login to each applications each time. This saves employee time and increases productivity.
Reduce Password Fatigue
Users don’t need to remember and manage multiple passwords – SSO reduces the number of passwords to one and makes it much simpler to remember and manage.
Easier Accounts Management
SSO gives clear visibility on what access is permitted for whom. It also helps in improving the speed of adding and disabling the accounts of outgoing employees.
Right Access To The Right People
Admin users can provide or deny access to specific users. For instance, if a particular user in a department wants an application to work on the admin can give access only to that person instead of giving it to the team which could result in confusion.
How does it work?
An SSO acts as an identity provider, acting as a common platform to manage identity and access rules across all of an organization’s cloud apps. When a user connects to the service provider to authenticate their identity, it transfers authentication to the identity provider. The identity provider validates the user’s credentials, and then sends a SAML token to the service provider for accessing the application.
Akku packs a powerful Single Sign On function whose customized SAML enables you to integrate a highly secure Single Sign On (SSO) with any cloud or in-house application, developed on any platform, including support for your intranet.
So, why continue to be frustrated with multiple passwords and multiple user accounts to access multiple applications? Make access easier for users and control easier for administrators with Akku.
