Guest OpEd by Danna Bethlehem Coronel, Director, Product Marketing, Identity & Access Management (IAM) at Thales

The days of network perimeter security are long gone. With corporate boundaries vanishing, the real battle to protect the network has moved to the realm of identity and access management (IAM).

Network perimeter security has lost importance because organizations have moved to the cloud and are rapidly adding apps and services to support their employees and customers in an always-connected world.

While cloud-based environments have turned businesses into more agile and efficient organizations, they have also exposed them to considerable risk.

Identities: valuable asset and lucrative target

Without robust access and authentication controls, it is easy to lose visibility into the thousands of identities operating within a modern company’s network.

Each user can have multiple identities to access an array of systems, while machines, non-human entities like apps and services, also hold various digital identities required for accessing data.

Digital identities have become a valuable asset for businesses, but they are also a lucrative target for cybercriminals. Most advanced attacks are actively leveraging compromised or stolen account credentials to circumvent security.

However, businesses are not effectively protecting these digital identities.

The Thales Access Management Index 2021 report indicates that 61% of the surveyed organizations do not have in place an access management solution, making identities an easy target for attackers.

Many of the most recent high-profile breaches, like the SolarWinds attack, used compromised identities and elevated privileges to bypass cybersecurity defenses.

Now is the time for organizations to invest in an IAM solution. The technology behind access management and authentication is evolving and has matured enough to address all emerging threats and reduce overall business risks.

All organizations have to do is select the IAM tool that fits their business and risk environment.

(Thrive with simple, secure access to all your apps, from anywhere with SafeNet Trusted Access. With SafeNet Trusted Access, you can accelerate organizational growth, minimize risks, and modernize your IT infrastructure with a modern authentication and access management platform. Let Thales help you centralize access management and authentication, reduce costs and avoid IT vendor lock-in for access to cloud and hybrid environments. Courtesy of Thales Cloud Security and YouTube.)

What are IAM tools?

IAM tools identify and validate users, applications, and devices. They then grant the appropriate authorities and permissions.

IAM tools are the backbone of modern cybersecurity, especially in the cloud. In fact, IAM is the key ingredient for zero-trust security. Zero trust cannot function without solid identity and access management.

Identity has become the new perimeter security because no matter where an asset is, it takes an identity with the proper permissions to access it.

Strong IAM tools can keep assets safe regardless of how many clouds make up an organization’s network or how many identities it manages.

IAM tools control the following aspects of a connection request:

Access

• Determine if the user trying to log in is allowed to do so.

Permission

• If access is granted, they are assigned an authority that determines what part of a network, which application, or what database they will be allowed to access.

Roles

• The user account will be assigned a specific role that will determine what they will be able to do with the allowed asset: read, write, execute, or all.

Monitoring

• Finally, the tools monitor and report on account activities to make sure no one is misusing their privileges or abusing the rights they have been granted.

(Do you have secure access to all of your cloud services? According to the 2020 Access Management Index, 58% of IT and security professionals believe cloud apps are the biggest targets for cyberattacks. Courtesy of Thales Cloud Security and YouTube.)

What to look for in an IAM tool

A robust IAM tool should be able to answer three questions:

• Who is allowed access?

• Which digital identity should have access to what?

• How are they proving the validity of credentials to access an account?

An IAM tool should also offer the following features:

• Cross-application and cross-network authentication

• Enforce appropriate access policies with ease

• Ease of implementation and administration

• Integration with all systems on a network including legacy ones

• Capability to support ‘remote IT’ scenarios such as remote onboarding of new users, remote provisioning and remote monitoring

• Help achieve compliance with regulations like HIPAA and GDPR which require strict security rules

Criteria for selecting an IAM tool

With so many vendors offering a variety of solutions, selecting the one that will help your organization to protect identities can be a tedious exercise.

The following criteria may make your life easier.

• Interface with Active Directory or LDAP implementations to improve user account management – many organizations are still reliant on legacy Microsoft-based applications and servers.

• Integrate Single Sign-On (SSO) with adaptive and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) – Integrating MFA with SSO enables you to define stronger security policies for accessing systems that are very sensitive.

• Complexity – how normal, day-to-day activities function with these tools, such as registering new tokens and new users, setting up protection for a new application, modifying security policies, and figuring out why a user can’t log into corporate applications.

• Reporting – offer the ability to schedule specific reports and have real-time monitoring for alerts and other activities.

• Adaptive authentication – contextual, risk-based authentication based on various attributes, such as time, location, role, and sensitivity of data.

• Mobile support – as more workers use their mobile devices for their computing needs, IAM tools should support logins from mobile devices and web-based applications. Enterprises may also want a way to store multiple factors on users’ phones and tablets, so they don’t have to carry traditional, hardware-based key fob tokens.

• Multiple token support – support a wide collection of hardware and software tokens as additional authentication factors. This gives more flexibility to be used in a variety of authentication situations.

• FIDO support – FIDO offers a passwordless, MFA authentication experience and removes the need to store the digital identity on any site.

How Thales benefits our customers

Thales SafeNet Trusted Access is a cloud-based access management solution that makes it easy to manage access to both cloud services and enterprise applications with an integrated platform combining single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, and scenario-based access policies.

(Learn More about SafeNet Trusted Access – Securing cloud access with contextual policies. Courtesy of Thales Cloud Security and YouTube.)

SafeNet Trusted Access simplifies user access to cloud services, streamlines cloud identity management, and helps eliminate password hassles for IT and users while providing a single pane view of access events across your app estate to ensure that the right user has access to the right application at the right level of trust.

About the Author

As the Director of Product Marketing and Identity & Access Management (IAM) at Thales, Danna Bethlehem Coronel leads product marketing for the company’s IAM product line.

This includes the articulation of the company’s product strategy and messaging, campaign development, through leadership, and PR, partner marketing, analyst relations, and sales enablement.

Related Technologies…

Strata Identity Takes Platinum in 2021 ‘ASTORS’ for Best Cloud Identity Orchestration Solution

American Security Today’s Annual ‘ASTORS’ Awards is the preeminent U.S. Homeland Security Awards Program, and now in its Sixth Year, continues to recognize industry leaders of Physical and Border Security, Cybersecurity, Emergency Preparedness – Management and Response, Law Enforcement, First Responders, as well as federal, state and municipal government agencies in the acknowledgment of their outstanding efforts to Keep our Nation Secure.

Strata Identity

• Best Cloud Identity Orchestration Solution

• Maverics Identity Orchestration Platform

• The cloud has created an identity management crisis, with companies being forced to simultaneously manage on-premises and several different cloud provider systems to enforce security policies.

• Strata’s Maverics Identity Orchestration Platform™ creates an identity control plane that enables customers to enforce a global access policy at scale across multiple distributed clouds and on-premises systems.

• It is not another Single-Sign-On (SSO), directory, or authentication solution, it is the first distributed, standards-based identity orchestration solution that automates multi-cloud and hybrid cloud identity management, and represents a brand new approach to distributed identity management.

• Maverics eliminates the need for companies to replace their existing identity systems or rewrite apps in order to make them compatible with new identity systems, which avoids years of integration and migration time and costs.

• Strata’s ‘migration factory’ approach enables organizations to “lift-and-shift” apps, whether it’s one or one thousand (or more), quickly to the Cloud.

• By design, Maverics connects to any identity system, transparently migrates users and credentials, replicates and synchronizes policies and configurations, and abstracts authentication and session management.

(With Strata’s Maverics Identity Orchestrator™, enterprise identity management is simplified as you can migrate and modernize your identity systems without painful application rewrites. You’ll save hundreds of hours, and millions of dollars on your upcoming project. Courtesy of Strata Identity and YouTube.)

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