In the current digital world, data is the order of the day. Almost all organizations have crucial data that they must protect at all costs from being accessed by an unauthorized individual. Most of these data are private and confidential and can have serious security threats if breached. But how can organizations ensure their critical data are only accessible to authorized individuals?
This is where cloud identity and access management are vital, as it acts as the perfect gatekeeper.
The computing environment has been proving complex year after year due to the tremendous changes and revolutions happening. The shift from on-premise systems to hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud environments is evidence of this revolution.
Moreover, the Covid-19 pandemic forced organizations to adopt a remote working approach. It led to a high need for user accounts, identities, services, and associated privileges that require proper management. Considering this fact, cloud identity and access management solutions are becoming more essential than ever before.
Identity and access management (IAM) solutions are vital in identifying, authorizing, and authenticating different users who want to access and use specific networks, portals, or applications. An effective IAM strategy saves organizations from security breaches that could lead to severe disasters.
Please read this article to understand more about the cloud-based authentication solution for IAM.
What’s the Difference Between Authentication and Authorization?
Let’s first differentiate these two crucial terms to better understand identity and access management.
Authentication is verifying a person trying to access a system. It helps ensure that the person who claims to be, is authorized and is the actual person with all rights to access the system. Numerous techniques are available to authenticate identity, including biometrics such as fingerprints, face recognition, and passwords.
On the other hand, authorization is where users are given rights to access and use a given system. Authorization is responsible for controlling significant critical actions in a system.
How do Identity and Access Management Work?
With the current high level of digitization, the IT environment is more diverse and complex. Users can now access organizations’ systems remotely from any location. This means there is a significant increase in security threats. In such a situation, a strong password is not enough for authentication. Therefore, there is a need for a better and more effective method that will ensure efficient and safe authentication.
According to sqm club Cloud-based identity and access management use multiple methods to authenticate users. For example, for a system to allow your accessibility, an IAM solution requests for a combination of passwords and temporarily generated OTP or biometric authentication such as a fingerprint. This helps boost the system’s overall security by adding an extra layer of protection.
Once an organization implements an IAM solution, the IT administrator enforces all access control measures. This helps limit the accessibility of the application, system, or networks based on the given roles of an individual. Additionally, the accessibility can be beefed up to allow or limit modification, viewership, creation or deletion of specific files, or changing settings.
Read more: Consent management refers to an organization’s protocols and processes for requesting and collecting user consent for their data and ensuring these varying levels of consent are adhered to throughout the data lifecycle at intertrust.com
Benefits of Using Identity and Access Management
- Enhanced Security
Cloud-based identity and access solutions help to identify and mitigate any possible security risks quickly. IAM solutions can provide alarms or alerts when a severe policy violation occurs in a network, system, or application. This helps to ensure that all security procedures are followed and adhered to by the users as stipulated by the law and the organization.
Additionally, IAM makes it easy to know when an unauthorized person tries to access or interfere with the system. This helps to reduce cybercrimes and unnecessary data deletions.
- Quick Sharing of Information
Information sharing is crucial when it comes to mitigating security breaches. IAM solutions allow organizations to have a centralized system where they can share information regarding authentication and authorization. Additionally, it helps enforce critical policies and regulations relating to the authentication of users, authorizing and validating them.
- Ease the Management Process
Cloud-based IAM solution makes it easier for administrators to manage users’ identity and access rights. Once can do this in all organization-based systems, networks, and applications. The administrator gives access management rights and access permissions depending on the user’s job profiles.
In addition, the system can grant access permission based on the user’s history, the risk involved, and the context in which the user is requesting permission to access specific IT infrastructure resources. This helps to simplify administrator’s management roles and provision or accessibility rights. When an organization has many users accessing the platform, the administrator will not have difficulty authenticating and providing accessibility rights.
- Productivity Gains
Identity and access management helps to centralize accessibility by creating all policies related to access. This allows administrators apply effective scalable and consistent techniques for implementing this policy. Additionally, cloud-based IAM solutions allow administrators to automate certain principles, such as granting or revoking accessibility rights to IT infrastructure, quickly and straightforwardly.
Automation technologies and tools can also provide instant accessibility by reviewing the user’s rights. This helps in saving valuable time that can be used in other productive activities and priority tasks. It also gives IT administrators peace of mind.
- Reduced IT Costs
Identity and access management can help reduce operating costs significantly. You don’t have to use local identities with federated identity services when authenticating external users. This helps to simplify and quicken the application process for administration. In addition, with cloud-based IAM, you can save the cost of buying and maintaining the on-premise IAM solutions.
Additionally, automation tools help you save the cost of buying and maintaining unnecessary software and hardware.
Bottom Line
Cloud-based identity and access management solutions are critical in the current digital world. With organizations dealing with a high number of sensitive data and simultaneously encouraging remote working, a safe and profound method to enhance the security of this data is needed. However, once you have migrated to cloud-based IAM, you must train your employees on how to access and maintain their access rights to the IT infrastructure resources, how to share security information, and the safe way to use the system.
Additionally, ensure you have the right IAM from a reliable service provider. Your IT administrator should also be conversant with the whole system.