Organizations are flocking to cloud services and mobile devices to cut costs and boost productivity. Despite the benefits, these technologies exacerbate the challenge of verifying identities and managing access to applications and data by consumers, employees and business partners from multiple devices and locations.

Let’s take a look at some of the most common identity and access management (IAM) challenges and how organizations can resolve them without compromising employee productivity.

Common Identity and Access Management Challenges

Organizations struggle to vet identities and approve access requests because the data resides in various locations and business units. Requesters often encounter roadblocks when seeking access, leading them to escalate requests to upper management and override the proper vetting process. Furthermore, those tasked with approving requests lack sufficient insight into which employees require access to confidential data.

The lack of a centralized, authoritative identity repository for users makes reconciliation another significant challenge. Additional problems arise when privileges on systems either exceed or lack access levels that were previously granted and provisioned.

When it comes to certification and accreditation, examiners may have insufficient knowledge of access needs. Not to mention, processes tend to be manual, cumbersome and inconsistent between business units. This task becomes even more difficult when examiners must conduct multiple, redundant and granular validations.

Provisioning and deprovisioning identities can pose a critical challenge when manual provisioning processes are ineffective. Organizations that fail to remove improper IAM privileges or resort to cloning access profiles will face similar struggles.

Failure to segregate duties and monitor administrators, power users and temporary access privileges can further impede enforcement. Other issues include lack of support for centralized access management solutions, such as directories and single sign-on, outdated or nonexistent access management policies, and failure to establish rule-based access.

Finally, compliance concerns arise when performance metrics do not exist and/or do not align with security requirements, such as removing identities and access privileges automatically upon an employee’s termination. Laborious and time-consuming audits only make this problem worse.

The CISO’s Role in Resolving IAM Issues

Chief information security officers (CISOs) must meet these challenges. Their teams must vet identities, approve appropriate access entitlements, and grant or revoke user identities, access and entitlements in a timely manner. Security leaders must also provision proper access to applications, data and resources for users who need it and examine identities and the corresponding access privileges periodically to realign with users’ job functions.

Enforcing compliance in accordance with the organization’s IAM policy is another key responsibility of the CISO. A strong IAM strategy also requires security leaders to define performance metrics and implement periodic or real-time automated auditing tools.

Considerations for Mobile and Cloud

Today, many organizations have gone mobile with bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies, enabling employees to access corporate data remotely. IAM serves as a foundational security component in environments that connect to mobile platforms.

Cloud services have also added daunting complexity to the IAM equation, forcing organizations to operate their capabilities on-premises and integrate with similar capabilities delivered by a cloud service provider (CSP). While these cloud platforms increase reliance on logical access controls, they also reduce network access controls.

Federation, role-based access and cloud-based IAM solutions exist to address these requirements. For example, the need to access apps hosted on the cloud goes hand in hand with the need to manage identities to protect personally identifiable information (PII).

Identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) is another effective solution to accelerate IAM deployments in the cloud. IDaaS supports federated authentication, authorization and provisioning, and it is a viable alternative to on-premises IAM solutions. When it comes to return on security investment, IDaaS eliminates the expense of implementing an on-premises solution.

It’s important to understand the need for IAM capabilities that effectively govern access to internally hosted apps. In a hybrid cloud IAM model, the IDaaS solution will need agent APIs or appliances that operate within the IT infrastructure to completely outsource the function. Securing these agents and interfaces represents a new source of risk for most organizations, and this risk must be managed.

Integrating Identity Management With Data Loss Prevention

It’s common for security professionals to provide identity information from an IAM tool to a data loss prevention (DLP) solution that continuously monitors sensitive data and correlates events to minimize the risk of losing sensitive data. The events are also correlated with analytical artificial intelligence and machine learning tools that analyze historical access behaviors to detect potential fraud.

Both IAM and DLP solutions must be leveraged to address insider threats and emerging threat vectors. Behavioral analytics and incident forensics tools provide additional monitoring capabilities. By integrating both of these solutions, organizations can handle the fast pace of emerging IT trends and threats with mobile and cloud computing.

Securing Social Media Identities

Organizations often leverage social media to interact with their customers, increase brand awareness and create a common identity repository. But if these social identities are breached, companies can face legal, regulatory, operational and reputational risks that may lead to the loss of customers.

Social media services must deploy strong IAM solutions to protect corporate accounts. These solutions include multifactor authentication (MFA) and notifications to alert users of multiple failed login attempts or attempts to authenticate from anomalous geographic regions. Awareness programs to educate employees about social media security must be an essential ingredient. CISOs should also inquire with legal to ensure that service-level agreements (SLAs) with social media providers account for proper IAM practices.

The Best of Both Worlds

In our increasingly mobile and connected world, IAM is more crucial than ever. To remain competitive, businesses around the world must embrace technologies and policies that enable employees to be as productive as possible.

However, it only takes one major data breach to negate all the benefits of that productivity. With a strong IAM program that proactively monitors user behavior for potentially malicious activity and periodically realigns access privileges with shifting job roles, organizations can have the best of both worlds: an empowered, productive workforce and a robust data security strategy.

Read the white paper: Deploy silent security to protect identities and future-proof your IAM