Digitization can help any organization reduce costs, increase productivity, and minimize the time-to-market of their products. There are clear risks that must be adequately addressed to realize these benefits. The digitization journey requires organizations to operate in a hybrid IT environment of on-premises and cloud-based applications. In this new environment, gaining transparency into who has access to which IT systems and applications in an organization and why is difficult. Frequently, security is the first casualty created by increasing business efficiency.
Business Innovation Drives the Threat of Security Breaches
Security breaches are far more than an organizational inconvenience. Insider or external attacks on an organization’s IT infrastructure often result in a severe negative impact on business operations. Whether unintentional or malicious, from employees and contractors or outside hackers, the effects of security breaches are the same. They include productivity loss, exfiltrated or corrupted business data, significant clean-up costs, reputational damage resulting in loss of customer or partner trust, and fines and litigation for not complying with national or international laws.
The threat of security breaches is so great and the potential consequences so catastrophic that mitigating them is no longer just a “back office” IT challenge. Today, it is a board-level concern. Both IT professionals and business leaders alike realize that enforcing the right processes for governing identities and their access is core to ensuring adequate security. For instance, in connection with the procedure for locking down access correctly and promptly in case a security breach should occur.
What The State of Identity Governance 2024 Tells Us About Identity Cybersecurity Threats
In late 2023, Omada conducted a survey of more than 550 IT security and business leaders to learn their assessments of their current identity governance strategies, what identity-related security threats present the greatest concern, and what functionality they look for when evaluating new identity governance and administration (IGA) solutions.
The State of Identity Governance 2024 report revealed that over 90 percent of IT and business leaders surveyed are concerned with the risks of identity-related cybersecurity threats.
Data suggests that the fear of cybersecurity threats is greater for organizations using legacy IGA solutions. When asked about specific identity-related threats, respondents using legacy and in-house-built IGA reported significantly more concern overall. In terms of the risk level to their organizations, respondents identified malware, identity security breaches, and vulnerability exploitation as the top specific threats they are concerned about. Not far behind these are concerns about access to compromised accounts of users, privileged accounts, and remote users.
But what is quite telling is how those organizations using a modern IGA solution differed in their concern level. Depending on the specific threat, there is a range of 9 to 21 percent difference in how organizations respond.
How Does Modern Identity Governance and Administration Help Bolster Security?
As organizations work to ensure that all IT systems – on-premises and in the cloud – meet strict identity and access security requirements to avoid security breaches, Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) has become central to effective IT security. Modern IGA systems enable organizations to adopt processes for controlling, managing, and auditing access to data, which is an important prerequisite to reducing security risk. There are three critical functions that modern IGA performs to ensure identity security breach management in an IT environment:
- Limit the exfiltration, loss, or corruption of sensitive data
- Limit the ability of an attacker to move laterally through the network
- Enable the organization to automate an emergency lockout when a security monitoring tool detects suspicious activity
Modern IGA can Automate Security Breach Detection
To limit the potential damage of unauthorized access, an organization must act quickly when it suspects that a user’s identity has been compromised. Automating the identity security breach detection process is critical to this effort. In the absence of automation, an organization’s IT department must expend resources to create an overview of which access the identity has and lock these down individually in the relevant business system.
The Modern IGA Security Breach Management Process
The first step quickly stops an attacker from continuing to perform any network reconnaissance, stealing confidential or sensitive data, or causing disruption to operations by corrupting data or making critical business systems unusable. In addition, suspending breached accounts gives the company time to perform a technical investigation and to deal with the non-technical aspects of critical security incidents such as internal and external communications management, protecting the company’s reputation and brand, and fielding external calls from customers and the press.
The second step ensures that once investigations have established the causes of the breach and the security administrators have taken the necessary steps to ensure the breach will not reoccur, the locked identities can be quickly reactivated so that business operations can continue. Further, attestation can be run on the impacted identity to ensure they still require the same level of access to proactively minimize subsequent.
Emergency Identity Lockout with Modern IGA
Organizations must have the capacity to quickly disable user accounts belonging to an individual if they suspect that one or more of them have been compromised to prevent attackers from continuing to do damage.
In the event of a user account being compromised, a modern IGA initiates an emergency lockout process to set an identity to “locked” and disable access to all systems for that identity. To accelerate the lockout process, the system should bypass the normal procedure of getting authorization from the employee’s manager. Use this process only in emergencies or when authorities request it. Make sure your organization defines this process in documented policies.
A manager or operation administrator should start the emergency lockout process in the IGA system and select the identity they want to lock. For auditing purposes, they must provide a reason for blocking the identity. The IGA system sets the identity to “locked” and the assignment is set to “disabled.” While an identity is set to “locked,” the status cannot be overwritten by any external interface.
Revoking an Emergency Identity Lockout with Modern IGA
When the organization no longer requires an emergency lockout for an identity, administrators must be able to quickly unlock it so the user may access the systems needed to continue working.
Best Practice IGA System Functionality
A manager or operations administrator starts the revoke emergency lockout process in the IGA system and selects the identity they want to unlock. For auditing purposes, they must input a reason why the identity is to be unblocked. The IGA system then sets the identity “unlocked”, and the assignment parameter is set back to “active.”
The Key Takeaway for Modern IGA Administrators
By implementing best practice standard processes, organizations ensure that they cover all security aspects related to identity governance and administration. Businesses can be confident that processes are covered and implemented even across the most complex and distributed IT environments.
A Partnership that Performs
iC Consult and Omada have joined forces to assist businesses in the digital transformation process. Together, we accelerate time to value by implementing best-practice methods for solution design and deployment. These methods reduce customer risk and ensure good identity governance.
To learn more about how our partnership can help you improve identity security in your organization, visit Omada.
