How can you make IAM risk management agile and responsive to threats?

One way to make IAM risk management agile and responsive to threats is to implement a continuous monitoring system. This system should be able to detect any unusual activity or behavior in real-time, and trigger an alert to the appropriate personnel. Another way is to regularly conduct risk assessments to identify potential vulnerabilities and prioritize them based on their impact and likelihood. This will help ensure that resources are allocated to the areas of highest risk. Additionally, IAM policies should be reviewed and updated on a regular basis to ensure that they are aligned with the organization's current business needs and security objectives.

I always believe in the famous saying “Kill IAM to save an IAM”. World has moved fast and the whole perception of risks has evolved. Todays IGA programs should stay close to this. For example how does DevOps influence IAM pipeline. Two cents to share.

IAM (Identity and Access Management) requires a multidisciplinary approach for holistic risk management, involving collaboration between IT, Operations, Business, and HR. This model integrates access rights management and HR lifecycle processes, ensuring organizational alignment and responsiveness to personnel changes. An agile approach is vital, encompassing assessment, definition, implementation, and monitoring, with a focus on cross-departmental collaboration. Such a strategy enhances IAM effectiveness, aligns with business objectives, and mitigates risks, underscoring the importance of diverse perspectives and skills in effective risk management.

Identity and Access Management (IAM) is critical for securing digital assets within an organisation. Effective risk management in IAM multidisciplinary approach. Key considerations include authentication / authorisation risks, credentials storage & management risks, inadequate monitoring and logging, remote access risks and emerging threats which occur by not adapting emerging IAM controls. While designing the desired state, all these factors to needs to be considered. Depending on the industry or domain, the complexity of addressing these controls varies. Addressing these risks through proactive measures, and shifting security to left through automation, organisations can contribute to overall cybersecurity resilience.

Based on the industry or domain you are in, the IAM risk management may be customized to cater to your specific needs. Such risk management frameworks can have specific administrative and other security controls that fill the gaps for your industry or domain.

Once the desired state is designed, it's important to implement the above mentioned controls to mitigate the risks through automation to ensure zero tolerance for errors and achieving operations at scale. Defining a workflow based procedure through automation ensures the required mechanisms are deployed automatically whenever a new actor / asset /user or role or process is planned or provisioned. Shifting security to left through automation ensures robust securty measures to safegaurd against vulnerabilities , exposures and data breaches.

New threats and vulnerabilities come out all the time, and IAM is not untouched by malicious actors trying to find a way to bypass the permissions, policies, and processes. Hence, continuous assessment of the efficacy of the policies and processes should be part of the planning of a practical implementation.

Monitoring should be real time and value added and should include a shared responsibility between IAM platform owners and business. The more this can be included within business ecosystem the more effective this is.

Observability & monitoring plays a vital role in ensuring the success of the IAM risk management controls that are put in place to safeguard activities, such as access requests, approvals, reviews, audits, incidents, and alerts. The monitoring should provide a realtime dashboard with actionable insights to quickly dive deep into concerned possible violations or otherwise false negatives. Whenever a possible violation is detected , the monitoring should be able to generate real time alerts in the system and allow respective owner take quick action or remediation.

Once the feedback for the security controls which are implemented for IAM risk management, there may be cases where the stakeholders would expect some kind of automation for mitigating the risks. For examples, while provisioning digital assets or planning business processes, certain violations are observed, logged and alerted. This passive security controls may not be sufficient for an industry with runs on high regulatory and compliance standards. Here the organisation may look for auto remediation of such violations and incidents besides generating alerts and actionable insights. This makes sure that obvious and certain category of violations can be auto remediated by using emerging technologies like AI & ML.

As part of the review, many new security controls may be identified. Think about automating such security controls as an actionable item. There may also be the need to add the existing policies and processes or the need to update the existing ones to stay current with the treats.