Fingers on virtual screen showing identity management and risk management

Improving Your Cybersecurity Posture With Identity Risk Management

Your people are your organization’s greatest asset, but their digital identities are also your most significant risk areas. No other facet of your IT environment is more frequently attacked. A compromised identity is the easiest way into your digital infrastructure and a gold mine for hackers. Given the prevalence and repercussions of identity-based attacks, it is crucial to understand the nature of your organization’s identity risk.

The sheer number of users, identities, devices, data, applications, and environments within enterprises makes managing user permissions and access while maintaining compliance a unique challenge. This increasingly complex organizational ecosystem underscores the necessity of an identity governance framework to uphold compliance and minimize the risk of a breach.

The good news is that, if executed correctly, identity management can be a significant advantage in your security infrastructure.

Let’s delve into the world of identity risk management: What is it and why is it crucial for your organization’s security?

General risk management involves identifying, assessing, and prioritizing risks to minimize their impact on your business. Identity risk management zeroes in on the vulnerabilities and threats surrounding identity within an organization. With four key elements, you can protect against sophisticated attacks:

  1. Risk prevention: Proactively curbing potential breaches before they materialize.
  2. Risk detection: Swiftly identifying and assessing emerging threats.
  3. Risk remediation: Taking decisive action to address vulnerabilities and mitigate risks.
  4. Risk prediction: Leveraging insights and past experiences to anticipate future challenges.

Many organizations find themselves trapped in a perpetual and exhausting detect-respond cybersecurity loop because they fail to address these four elements. That is, they lack a comprehensive approach to risk assessment and remediation. To succeed, you must employ integrated tooling, including identity governance, privilege management, access management, and Active Directory management. In this article, we will focus on identity governance.

What is an identity governance framework?

An identity governance framework is the structure or plan your organization defines to centralize governance across the disparate systems you use for identities, entitlements, privileged accounts, applications, and data. It is the collaboration space where people, processes, and technology come together to review and manage who has access to your IT systems, resources, and assets. The framework provides the foundation for the Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) capabilities that govern access across your environment.

Here is a simple example: at home, your whole family can access your video and music streaming services, downloaded video games, and so on. However, your younger children’s access can be restricted; they cannot view PG-13 and unsuitable content on your services.

It is hard enough to get that right without upsetting our home “users,” so imagine scaling that problem up to thousands of employees with a complex set of IT systems and access methods. Controlling who has access to what can become incredibly complex, and that is where an identity governance framework steps in.

Why is identity governance important?

Giving full access to every user in your organization would be a disaster. You can’t have IT systems with sensitive information available to everyone—think about data such as employee health care or payroll information. To keep your organization safe, you need to ensure that users have the appropriate level of access to do their jobs – no more, no less. Over time, access levels must converge to the “right” level. A well-designed and mature identity governance framework makes this “Entitlement Right Sizing” a natural progression and provides standard workflows, analytics, and intelligence to drive towards the desired “Just Enough Permissions” state.

Identity governance frameworks reduce users’ permissions to their minimum, least privileged level. This means they can still do their job but are not contributing to a larger attack surface for threat actors. The fewer entitlements a user has, the less a hacker can do to the organization with their account if it gets infiltrated or compromised. This simple step of improving your access hygiene improves your levels of breach resiliency by making it harder for infiltrators to elevate and move laterally.

The benefits of an identity governance framework

There are several benefits that identity governance frameworks provide for businesses:

  • Reduces operational costs: When IT administrators grant access to assets manually, it can become very costly to maintain a team large enough to handle all access requests. Automating a significant percentage of the process can free up the workforce for use elsewhere in the company. Additionally, if you close identities that are not being used anymore, the company will not have to pay for them.
  • Reduces risk and strengthens security: Humans are error-prone, especially when they must hurry to keep up with many requests. Administrators could easily grant users too much or insufficient access, creating friction within the organization or elevating users’ security risk levels. Automation and AI-generated decision recommendations can save the day. Since identity governance frameworks alert IT admins to abnormalities in user behavior, discrepancies can quickly be addressed.
  • Improves compliance and audit performance: The framework’s ability to bring systems under governance through pre-established and ever-improving policies allows you to assure auditors that you control your most critical business systems.
  • Delivers fast, efficient access to the business: Identity governance frameworks offer automation, enhanced user experiences, and spotlighting of insights that allow IT administrators to make decisions about access quickly. These capabilities speed up access, making it quicker and easier to fulfill these duties.

Best practices for implementing an identity governance framework

There are a few tactics you can use when articulating the importance of identity governance to your business constituencies:

  • Understand your business’s problems and how an identity governance framework can assist with those problems. Congratulations! Reading this article was a great start.
  • Recruit project delivery managers who understand identity governance requirements. They will be the ones who select the work that will take you on a successful path and make sure everyone on the team knows what they need to do. They will also promote the framework to different departments within the company.
  • Highlight that the framework exists to serve the organization’s interests. What is important to your organization? Is it security? Operational efficiency? Identify the framework’s drivers and revolve the identity governance framework rollout around that.
  • Expand your purpose beyond IT security. Promote how the framework will benefit multiple departments, such as HR, logistics, tech, finance and so on. To get funding for the program, the framework needs to appeal to the whole business.

Implementation mistakes to avoid

  • Positioning your governance program as a purely IT-related program: Promote the program as a way to enhance security and operational efficiency and obtain the resources needed for implementation. Interestingly, allowing HR or business to be overly dominant will also derail your program. The mistake here is failing to realize that successful identity governance is an ongoing, constructive dialogue between business needs and technical capabilities and constraints.
  • Not being strategic about where the identity governance framework is introduced within a large company: Consider what part of your program pitch resonated most with the stakeholders. If security is most important, start with your most high-risk application. If operational efficiency is critical, begin with the applications most popular among your coworkers and customers.
  • Shying away from engaging stakeholders to promote change: An identity governance program needs to focus on advancing the business drivers that led to its inception, often requiring promotion and articulation of the value of change.

Identity and access governance within an organization’s entire security posture

In the same way identity governance is being asked to take on more business-critical roles, react and deploy faster, and be easier to use, it is also increasingly being asked to integrate more closely into the rest of the IT security landscape.

The goal here is to prevent the emergence of a siloed IT security stance, which exposes organizations to security weaknesses in the form of gaps between systems. Integrating your identity governance framework with the rest of your organization’s security systems will alert you if an identity is compromised across your organization. This allows you to close it out before it can enter other areas instead of relying on one system’s local defenses to contain it.

The end goal is an identity governance framework that exchanges data and signals with all other systems within your environment, creating a central hub for identity visibility and management. This hub becomes a policy definition and information point where you can define and enforce centralized access governance and security policies. This is why identity governance and administration must be included as a core work stream in any organization’s overall IT security program, with many organizations consciously adopting and articulating an identity-first approach to cybersecurity.

Maximizing your security through identity management

In the ever-evolving cybersecurity landscape, identity remains the primary target for malicious actors. However, organizations can fortify their defenses against potential threats with a robust identity risk management solution. Businesses can safeguard their most valuable assets and outmaneuver bad actors by focusing on prevention, detection, remediation, and prediction. A well-implemented identity governance framework is not just a protective measure but a strategic advantage that enhances operational efficiency, ensures compliance, and strengthens overall security posture.