Identity Management: Secure Business across Multiple IT Environments
The corporate world is facing severe data breaches every day and after implementing all required steps, companies fail to prevent cyber attacks.
If we look at this distressful scenario, then there is an urgency to change the perception of security. Yes, it will be ideal to secure individual identity as the first line of defense rather than securing the entire corporate network.
The reason to centralize the security of individual identity is boosting volume in the database and applications. If companies wish to secure ongoing data, they need to secure the identities of users.
Companies now have to think differently instead of applying traditional security protection methods to manage security and personal identities. Now we will look at the concept of Identity Management (ID management), its requirement, and implementation.
About Identity Management:
Identity Management is a broad concept that includes, identification and control of individual identities in an enterprise. Identity management initially defines the user’s activities related to the network with specific devices.
It reduces the surplus efforts and decreases the cost by providing a booster to productivity and security. There are tools for identity management that works on-premise and in the cloud.
The policy on Identity management specifies which applications and users are allowed on the network. When a user illicitly accesses resources for which he is not authorized, it will buzz an alert.
What Identity management can do?
To get a competitive advantage in your company, identity management is required as many organizations allow users, employees, suppliers, contractors to access the internal system to increase efficiencies and lower costs.
In this regard, ID management allows a company to expand its access to information systems but keeping in mind the security aspect. Controlled Identity management can bring revenue, productivity, and satisfaction by providing extensive access to outsiders. Apart from this, Identity management helps to automate password reset and other time-consuming and pricey functions.
Another concern about orphan accounts of employees, vendors who have left the company, which should be removed. Those accounts will be removed automatically with the help of Identity Management.
ID management can evaluate risk factors, risk management, and risk mitigation by alerting business managers of the concerned area so managers can track those issues that matter the most.
Steps involved in the Identity Management Plan:
To make a successful implementation of an ID management plan, organizations should follow certain steps, which are discussed as under.
- Build a Case: It involves documentation of role management, provisioning, compulsions so; first, check the cost of the current task and potential task done through ID management. The other cost should focus on personnel, technology that will be a part of ID management. After that, put the proposal before stakeholders.
- Prepare Guideline: The chief information security officer (CISO) should evaluate the applications to be deployed in numerical order. The CISO also decides whether the ID management should have centralized or decentralized control. After getting the approval of stakeholders, the CISO should consider, account access, application priority, design on the base of ID management architecture, framework.
- Define Roles: An Organization has to recognize the role of a user, user access across the organization. There should be a policy to define the right of a person to access the identity and the limitation of his/her access. For that, the officer has to take permission from several departments regarding resource access.
- Run Testing: Make proof of an idea about various products to be tested against ID management. For that, classify the needs of stakeholders and execute the test on different products. Analyze the difficulty level faced at the execution of particular testing. It should be noted that the testing environment should be the same as the organizational environment.
- Roll Out ID Management: Finally, the time has come to start ID management as per the decided roadmap. To successfully roll out ID management, you should now give proper training to personnel, regulate the ID management configuration. System integration should be tested as well different performance parameters should be there along with a help desk. There must be continuous monitoring of the performance by keeping parameters in mind.
Conclusion:
In the enterprise, identity management refers to establishing and managing an individual’s exclusive rights over the network. Once the digital ID of an individual is set, it should be monitored and maintained throughout the lifespan. By implementing ID management, organizations can protect the business across the spread IT environment of the data center.
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