Key Identity Governance Best Practices for Enhanced Security

During the COVID-19 pandemic, enterprise identity management has experienced a significant renaissance. With more remote workers and new compliance regulations, it’s important to focus on identity governance.

Ensure unique identifiers for each human and non-human identity in the directory. This allows for a clear trail of activity.

Centralize identity and access management for more visibility across directories, applications and devices. This makes access reviews more effective and reduces risks from orphaned accounts.

Automated Lifecycle Events

Strong identity governance best practices rely on authoritative sources for identity data, which allows security leaders to make informed decisions about access – what it should be, when to turn it on or off, and why. These decisions depend on identity-centric data, which must be accurate and consistent across your environment for the most impactful results. Authoritative identity data requires defined lifecycle management processes for employees and non-employees, constant validation and update of the authoritative source, and proper storage to ensure the availability of the latest information to the security leadership team.

It’s also necessary to link the authoritative identity repository to automated provisioning/de-provisioning flows and associated workflows so that when people join or leave the company, re-organize departments, or shift into new roles, their permissions follow suit. This avoids orphaned accounts with access and privilege that hackers can exploit. It also gives business stakeholders a bird’s eye view or as much granularity as they need for review.

This is especially important for privileged accounts, which are the most valuable target for hackers and must be carefully managed to achieve the least privilege. A CIEM solution with integrated security operations (SIEM) can help address these risks by enabling a unified workflow for the granting and revoking of privileged access, ensuring that those permissions are only granted to users who need them based on business justification and approved by authorized individuals.

Segregation of Duties

Giving one person too much control within a business process opens the door for unchecked errors and fraud that could lead to financial loss, damage to reputation or compliance violations. To prevent this, segregation of duties (SoD) requires that different individuals perform each step of a critical business process. This ensures that individuals can’t manipulate data, approve fraudulent invoices, or commit any other security compromise.

Segregating duties is a common internal control that many organizations use to reduce risk in their key processes. However, companies often struggle with implementing SoD because it can increase costs, process complexity and staffing requirements. This leads to companies limiting the application of SoD to their most vulnerable or mission-critical elements, leaving other parts of their business at risk.

You can create an SoD matrix using identity governance based on unique user roles and tasks defined in your ERP or CRM system. With this, it’s possible to automatically verify whether a specific user can perform multiple steps in a transaction workflow.

A strong SoD system also allows you to rotate the duties and responsibilities of certain management roles to mitigate risks. This can be done by ensuring that all user access rights are tied to a position, which is then assigned a set of duties on a rotation basis.

Authentication

Authentication is the process that verifies the identity of a user, application or device before it is given access to a system. Authentication can be achieved through various methods, from simple passwords to two-factor authentication (2FA) and biometrics. In addition to authentication, authorization determines what a user can do once they have gained access to a system. The commission aims to implement the principle of least privilege (PoLP), which reduces risk by limiting the permissions granted to users.

A company should establish and regularly enforce granular access roles to prevent access creep. This involves a mix of policies, procedures and automated tools that can update governance in real-time to reduce the risk of data breaches.

A key component of identity governance is ensuring accurate and authoritative information exists for all identities within the organization, including those in cloud providers. This includes the ability to account for all attributes of digital identities, such as location, devices, reporting relationships and business functions. This enables companies to make the most of hyper-connectivity without exposing sensitive data to hackers and allows IT teams to bridge gaps between business units effectively.

For example, when a manager leaves your company, it is important to ensure the correct person takes over their access ensuring the correct person takes over their access is important. This can be done through regular access certification reviews, which can also help to mitigate risks posed by compromised credentials.

Analytics

As digital identities proliferate, security leaders need a way to manage these identities securely. The identity governance and administration (IGA) process provides a centralized, policy-based management system for user accounts, associated access entitlements, roles, and other identification attributes across the IT infrastructure. IGA reduces risk by ensuring that users have only the right level of privilege to systems, applications, and data and that privileged users aren’t abusing their elevated access.

IGA programs should establish a clear governance framework to govern the provisioning of new credentials and existing accounts and provide visibility into access requests, approvals and approvals, role management, and auditing and reporting. A strong governance framework is critical to the security and compliance of any organization.

An IGA system can also help to protect against cyber criminals by limiting the lateral movement they can make using stolen credentials with anomaly detection and by enforcing the principle of least privilege for privileged accounts.

A CIEM solution can also implement Just-in-Time access so that privileged permissions are only provided when required and approved by an authorized person. This helps to limit further the number of “orphan” accounts, reducing the risk of those accounts being abused by cybercriminals. With a solid Identity Governance program, organizations can be confident they are protecting their most valuable assets.