What Are the Three Most Common Access Risks?

These days it seems like there are security solutions for almost everything except the one thing you can never fully secure: humans. But while you can’t control everything they open or click on, you can control their access to your sensitive data.

However, with increasing numbers of staff, devices, partners, locations and more, it is becoming tougher than ever to keep users access secure. How can you ensure least privilege access for all of your users when there are too many things to keep track of? While challenges seemingly come from all directions, here are the three most common offenders:

• Routine changes such as hiring, promotions, transfers or third-party contractors
• Business changes such as reorganizations, the addition of new products, or new partnerships
• Infrastructure changes such as mobility, cloud adaptation, system upgrades, or new application rollouts

In addition to stresses from these three changes, the number of government regulations that influence how business is conducted across many industries continues to rise. From healthcare to banking, the number of regulations can climb into the hundreds, making full compliance more difficult and complex than it has ever been. This increase in regulations along with the increase in complexity of access rights (such as increased applications, devices, etc.) means that organizations must make standardized and closely managed identity access a top priority. These policies are known as Identity Governance and Administration (IGA).

How Does IGA Combat the Top Three Risks? 

With an increasing number of computers and other devices and an increase in the ways in which users access resources, access rights and the monitoring and managing of complex user access rights becomes harder every day. The stresses and strains of access can come from all over but the most common offenders are:

These are only a few examples of ways that IGA can support and enable the business as well as help ensure proper access based on your policies or on industry regulations to remain compliant.

#1: Risk From Routine Changes

Faster, more accurate onboarding of new employees, contractors, and business partners by using roles, business-friendly user interfaces, and policy-driven approval workflows. These help to ensure least privilege access during day-to-day operations such as on/o­ boarding users and performing access reviews.

#2: Risk From Business Changes

With roles based access control you can build out new roles faster and more accurately for employees impacted by business changes to prepare for a reorganization or merger or acquisition. It is also possible to easily view directly assigned and hidden access and quickly identify outlier access both before and following business changes such as a reorganization or M&A activity.

#3: Risk From Infrastructure Changes

New application rollout? No problem. By adding in the new application using your IGA solution, you can quickly provision whole teams at once and get them started within minutes with the correct, least privilege access required to be eff­ective from day one.