Why 2023 is the year to invest in Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Security should be at the heart of all business processes. This is especially true of data and cyber security in the digital age. Data breaches and the loss of your cyber security integrity are one of the biggest threats to your business. It is one of the hardest challenges that any business can attempt to recover from, and can lead to huge financial and legal penalties. This is why prioritising your data security and ensuring that your security measures are up to scratch is one of the fundamental responsibilities of any business. This is where Identity and Access Management (IAM) comes in.

?What is IAM?

How has data ownership changed?

Before the huge steps in digital transformation over the last few decades, all data and intellectual property maintained and owned by businesses was internal. This could be through stock books and paper records to data being stored on hard drives and within the company’s technological property. As a digital transformation has pushed many services and technologies towards cloud technology, data is being shifted towards external methods of storage.

This naturally increases the risk of this data getting into the hands of a malicious party. Before, the only way that someone could infiltrate your data was by having physical access to the computer and technology systems that it was stored on. Now that this data is external, a malicious party could gain entry to your data from anywhere in the world.

This makes the biggest security risk to data integrity the identification process through which users gain access to your data. If a malicious party can convince your security solution that they are a permitted user, they will have full access to all of your company’s data. This makes it vital for business leaders to invest in the right identity and access management tool for their business.

Evolution of data criminality

As technology has evolved, IAM solutions have needed to become much more sophisticated.

UK Government?research ?found that 39% of businesses and 26% of charities report having cyber security breaches or attacks in the last 12 months. This figure was even higher among medium businesses (65%) and large businesses (64%).

This is largely because digital transformation has also made it easier for criminals to operate online. This is increasingly becoming a problem for businesses for three main reasons.

Increasing user access

As companies grow they naturally expand their workforce. This means that IT departments are having to assign and create many more user profiles for access to their technology platforms. This is especially true of companies that have a significant proportion of their workforce comprised of freelancers and external workers. As the number of user identities increases so does the number of access requests that your cyber security solution has to approve.

This makes controlling access to your sensitive data much more difficult. It means security teams have to manage identities and the privileges assigned to them across a broad range of hardware configurations and large geographical areas. This makes it harder to spot a malicious party trying to gain access to your system, increasing the security risks to your data.

More ‘endpoints’ to technology systems

Similarly, as the number of users increases, so does the total amount of computer systems trying to access your technology platforms. If any of your employees work from home or are contracted on a remote working basis, this may well include hardware that is not owned by your business or distributed by your IT department.

Some workers may use their personal devices, such as their mobile phones or tablet, to sign into their work accounts to remain connected to their work while on the move. These devices will not have any corporate management or security software installed on them, making them harder to track and keep tabs on.

All of this results in more ‘endpoints’ in your system existing, providing more opportunities for cybercriminals to act as approved users to try and gain access to your data.

Cybercrime is becoming a national sport

?As cybercrime has become a lucrative industry, the criminals trying to gain access to your data are becoming more sophisticated. With sensitive data worth up to millions of dollars and criminals able to remain largely anonymous during their heists, it is now becoming a national and international sport of criminal gangs.

Businesses’ resilience to cyber-attacks is also falling. A?study ?by Accenture found that their respondents experienced a 32% increase in 2021 in the number of successful cyber attacks compared to 2020.

As a result, having a robust IAM solution should be an essential part of any business’s cyber security strategy. This is because protecting the access points to your data is the most important cyber security step that you need to make. They are a fundamental weakness in the security of your organisation and they are most readily exposed when identifying user access to your data repositories.

How does an IAM solution work?

Protecting the access points to your data involves two different decisions for IT departments. Firstly, who do you trust with access to your data and systems? Secondly, how can you identify if it is really them?

What steps does protecting the access points of your data involve?

Luckily, an identity and access management solution has several tricks to correctly, identify the users that you trust access to your data with. To manage access to your data, an IAM solution adopts a zero-trust approach. This means that any user trying to access your data has to prove that it is really them. This can be achieved by utilising multi-factor authentication such as automatically generated, login, codes or messages through different applications and hardware that is known to be owned by a particular user.

While this is not a complete guarantee that all user identities will be correctly managed, it does provide a significant level of protection above that of a simple login portal. Many sophisticated, IAM solutions support a large number of different applications and processes for two-factor authentication or more to ensure that they can be easily adapted to the current requirements of your business.

What does an Identity and Access Management System look like?

At a core functional level, an IAM system can include a single sign-on system, multifactor, authentication systems and privileged access management. These systems are fully compliant with all national and international regulations to store identity and process data. IAM processes are specifically designed to ensure that only trusted user identities have access to the data they require.

These solutions can be either deployed in person or through a cloud-based deployment model. This will depend on the requirements of your business and the capability of the external technology partner who you work with.

?Why you need an enterprise IAM solution now more than ever

Cybercrime and the vulnerability of your data have never been higher. As data breaches have the potential to cause significant damage to the integrity of your business, an identity and access management solution is more critical than ever.

Many companies are especially vulnerable to cyber attacks as they do not have a competent hold of the current data they manage. How do you know what data is missing? If you do not know what data was there in the first place? It may be easy to calculate the size of the data that is accessed by numerous business partners on a daily basis, but it is harder to recognise the data that is used less frequently.

Data breaches are one of the biggest threats to your organisation

To ensure that none of the data that you hold has gone missing, the best way is to know what the total volume of your data was before and after any data breach. And without this knowledge and the ability to manage access as part of your data security methods, your critical business and brand information is at risk.

One report has?calculated ?that more than ￡736 million was lost through business cyber-crime in 2021 alone. This figure jumps to ￡2.5 billion when individual losses are included alongside attacks on businesses.

2023 is an opportunity to get identity and access management right

If your company has been lucky enough to avoid any major data breaches up until now, the new year provides the perfect opportunity to get identity and access management right. This being said, there is no silver bullet or off-the-shelf solution that is perfect for every business. Instead, you need to find the right system for your business needs.

This will depend on the total size of your company, and the total amount of users that you trust to give access to your data. For smaller companies, this may be a small selection of employees that comprise the core team in a single location. For larger companies, this could mean managing access to thousands of users across different regional and international locations and a wide selection of hardware. However, regardless of the size of your business, having a sophisticated and robust enterprise IAM solution is essential.

What is your business’ security posture?

Another factor that will determine the type of IAM solution that is best for you is your security posture. Finding the right security posture for your business means, balancing any defensive security provisions against the freedom, you give your users to conduct business. Many may think the best posture for maximum security is to adopt any and all security provisions. However, this would be a mistake.

Why too much security is a mistake

Too much security provisioning can actually be negative for your business processes and growth. This is because it will fundamentally limit the freedom of users accessing your data and increase the time it takes for users to access, interact and deploy data throughout your business. Indeed, this is often the posture that is recommended by chief information security officers as they want to provide the best possible protection for the data within your business.

Instead of this hardline approach, you need to find a security solution that works within the freedoms that you give to your users to access data. This means finding the balance between having stringent and sophisticated user identification and management tools and giving seamless access to your company to the users that you trust.

How an external technology consultant can help

While business leaders have struggled to get this balance right in past years, 2023 provides the perfect opportunity to find the right security posture for your business. Here, an external technology consultant with vast experience deploying and managing an identity and access management solution can help.

This is because we now have the knowledge and technology in 2023 to be able to provide a robust identity and access management solution while also not?sacrificing any freedom to do work within your business.

At Francis North, we have years of experience handling and managing identity and access management solutions for their clients. They are perfectly positioned to help executives and C-suite clients find the right solution and security posture for their team.

Finding the balance between security measures and business freedom

Adopting any cyber security solution is a case of balancing risks within your organisation. Having a security posture that is too sparse of defensive provisioning and lacks an IAM solution will put your business’s critical data and your brand identity at risk. Equally, having a security posture that is too defensive will limit the freedom of business processes and growth