The 7 Tenets of Successful Identity & Access Management

An integrated enterprise solution will control and monitor all your users, all your applications, all your data, and all access rights.

2.Remember Your Customer - The enterprise has to service a wide range of  internal customers with different data access needs from different locations using different   access devices. The IAM solution must be adaptable across all this. No matter where the user is (or on what type of device), they must be able to access the necessary data without complications. Any user, any platform, any time. In a friendly, easy way.

3. Be Context Aware - Understanding users and, most importantly, the data and resources they should and typically access is critical. Identity context is about sharing and understanding these relationships and translating them into entitlements or rights. That context model needs to sit in the center of the security and operations infrastructure as the identity governance and administration engine. It is a model of known relationships between people, accounts, privileges and data.

4. Govern by Model - Managing the access of thousands of users requires governance models. These models are what make the IAM engine effective. Automation, Role, Change, Risk, and Control models each drive compliance and, as a group, drive common policy. Placing governance models at the center creates a stable, repeatable and scalable approach to enterprise identity control.

5. Managing Risk is a Verb - Managing risk is the mechanism for how you know when an action falls outside of normal usage.  Identity risk scoring can be accomplished by model in an advanced IAM system.  Risk scoring allows for faster access authentication and tracking strategies.  Low-risk accounts may have only read privileges and no access to confidential information while a high-risk profile may have privileged access or orphaned accounts. No matter what, knowing a user’s risk profile helps in assessing how closely their online activities need to be monitored.

6. Connect to Everything - When considering an integrated IT system such as identity access management, the most difficult decision an enterprise needs to make is determining how much of an existing platform to keep and how much needs to be replaced.  Some parts of their internal  IT architecture will stay the same and so the IAM system needs to be flexible enough to connect  to everything and anything. Effective identity and access management  requires connectivity from any kind of platform to any kind of data repository.

7. Be Consistent - This may sound intuitive but consistency in all these actions and approaches is key. The business user wants access regardless of where the apps are served. The auditor only cares about compliance, not where data is stored. The IAM solution needs to bridge gaps like these seamlessly and consistently to secure the business in a scalable way.  Regardless of where the data resides, one-off connections or patched provisioning should be excluded from the IAM implementation design, otherwise scalability will be impacted whether data is structured or unstructured.

The modern enterprise is more complex than ever and identity and access management is at its core. While it is possible for enterprises to piece together their own solutions, the number of rules, number of best practices, and number of intricacies involved with implementing a secure IAM solution is huge. There is a lot at stake. It only takes one incorrect configuration to open your enterprise to anyone wanting in.

Here at SailPoint, we understand business users, business complexities and most of all, we understand what is at stake when it comes to accurate identity monitoring and compliance. You spent your life’s work on your business. We have done the same in identity and access management. We have refined the mechanisms for fast and effective IAM strategy and are ready to share our vision, solutions and knowledge with your organization.