Principles of successful identity and access management

An enterprise identity and access management solution helps you minimize risk. When looking for a solution that is right for your organization, consider the following principles of successful identity and access management.

The six principles of successful identity and access management

1. Plan across the Enterprise

Identity & access management is not a “do-it-yourself” project. The vast number of platforms, applications, systems and users in modern enterprises require an integrated and scalable identity and access management system. Starting with the management of passwords in heterogeneous environments and across numerous data repositories, from rights and role management to auditing and compliance management. In the worst case scenario, your identity and access management platform causes a security breach that is not immediately detected, but that a cybercriminal could exploit later.

An integrated identity and access management platform can centralize all rules, compliance monitoring in one place and ensure that nothing is overseen. Only an enterprise-wide identity and access management solution controls and monitors all users’ access to all systems, applications and data.

2. Know your Users and their Requirements

Organizations need to serve a wide range of internal and external users with different access requirements from different locations, using different types of access devices. The identity and access management solution must be flexible and easily adaptable. Each access must be identified and authenticated quickly, transparently and securely.

3. Roles and rights: Be context aware

It is crucial to understand when users want to access a particular IT resource. The context of identity and access management is about truly understanding these relations, and translating them into an appropriate roles and rights model. This context model should be at the heart of identity governance. This model defines all known relationships between accounts, data, applications and access rights.

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4. Leverage IT governance processes

Managing access to thousands of users requires governance processes. These consist of a series of automation, role, change, risk, and control processes. Governance processes often start with human resources and define the procedures for new employee onboarding, employee changes, and terminations. In addition, IT security needs standardized processes for monitoring access activities. On the other hand, IT auditing requires specific compliance and audit processes. The use of governance processes creates a stable, automatable and scalable approach to identity control in the enterprise.

5. Integrate comprehensively

Before deciding on an integrated identity and access management platform, a company must determine whether existing systems are to be replaced or integrated. Experience from numerous projects shows that existing systems must always be integrated into the identity and access management architecture. The new identity and access management platform must be able to integrate flexibly into the existing IT architecture and be able to connect to existing systems/applications. This requires a variety of different connectors that can be used to integrate systems, applications, existing directory services and databases.

6. Be consistent

In all the above steps, it is critical to be consistent and consistent. All users want immediate access to applications and data, regardless where they are, or where the applications are being hosted. An auditor just doesn’t care, where the data is stored, he only cares about fulfilling compliance requirements. The identity and access management solution must seamlessly and consistently bridge such gaps to comprehensively secure the enterprise.

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