How can you manage IAM roles for temporary workers in Cybersecurity?

The same way you do for all employees! Securely, autonomously, and make sure those roles are tied to least-privileged access rights.

IAM roles are access controls for groups of users that have common responsibilities and requirements within an application or data set. Roles should be clearly defined with a Least Privilege model and evaluated continuously.

I believe that the definition of an IAM role is somewhat vague. While some applications may label certain roles as IAM roles, the core concept in the IAM cybersecurity domain is the Authorization Model. There are several authorization models that an organization can implement to effectively manage the permissions granted to an identity within information systems. One of the most popular is the RBAC model, where access permissions are organized around roles, and users are assigned to specific roles based on their responsibilities or job functions. Each role is granted a set of permissions that define what actions or resources users in that role can access.

Make sure you have good foundational processes to grant, monitor, and especially remove access for contractors or temporary workers. In many companies, managers are the responsible party to ensure access is appropriate, and often temporary workers are NOT in the company’s HRMS system (bad best practice), forcing managers to e sure the requests for removal are done when they change roles or terminate. The impetuous is to get them onboarded but often there is not a focus when they leave allowing privileges to remain active long after the temporary worker is gone.

Powerful, granular resource to control access and enable different people, apps, and systems to work together in the company. Quick points: - Automate the revocation and auditing of accounts. - Monitor access and have an updated and tested incident process to deal with deviations. - Enable MFA wherever possible for all accounts, especially high-privileged ones.

In this article, the topic under discussion is temporal role assignments to external collaborators. This constitutes a crucial aspect of an IAM system, enabling organizations to effectively manage temporary access to their information systems. When access or assignments expire, the IAM system should automatically revoke access to the system.

IAM roles are temporary and can be assigned to a worker for a specific period of time or until a specific task is done. This is important as Temporary workers might not be familiar with an organization's security policies and procedures, and may inadvertently compromise the security of the organization's resources. On top of it, many of these organizations will be subject to regulatory compliance requirements that dictate who can access what type of data. IAM roles allow organizations to track and audit the actions of temporary workers, which can help to ensure that they are using resources appropriately and in accordance with the organizational policies. This can also help to identify any potential security or compliance issues early on.

Temporary accounts enables these professionals to help our company during their contracted period. - Make sure to monitor abnormal user activity and revoke access immediately. - One compromised account can lead to a vast incident like the many cyberattacks we have had over the years.

To be more specific, it depends on the authorization model that the organization uses. Following the example of the RBAC model (Role-Based Access Control), this framework provides a methodology that enables the organization to define specific business roles, and assign one to each external identity based on certain attributes. This a complex process that requires a lot of effort.

It depends on the target system. The absolutely best way to execute and manage assignments is through an Identity Management system. These systems enable organizations to efficiently assign and revoke access and permissions for identities across all integrated applications. Every large organization with complex information systems should consider implementing such a solution.

There’s no difference when it comes to governance of temporary workers bd employees, they all must be included in ALL governance routines (monitoring, periodic attestations, etc).

The best way to monitor assignments is through automated reports connected to the identity database. In cases where the organization lacks an Identity Management (IDM) solution, each report should utilize the data sources from each application to gather the necessary information and generate the report.

I saw first hand on how even large companies mature their IAM processes over time. Most companies while they set up the initial accesses, grant temporary workers full access to their cloud resources, which lead to security and compliance issues. I have seen examples where some temp workers had accidentally deleted critical data, while others had accessed sensitive data that they were not authorized to access. To address these, the company implemented IAM roles. They created a set of pre-defined roles that granted temp workers access to only the resources that they needed to do their jobs, and set up monitoring on the actions of these roles. They also implemented alerts and notifications to notify them if any unusual activity was detected.

Administering IAM roles for temporary employees can be a consistently challenging task. To streamline this process, you have the option to implement process automation using either Terraform or ARM templates for Azure, or CloudFormation templates for AWS within a cloud environment.