IT governance focuses on aligning IT systems and operations with business goals. It also includes a system of monitoring and evaluation.
Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a critical component of an IT governance framework. IAM provides greater visibility into entitlements and helps manage users with unified policies, often with password enablement and multifactor authentication (MFA) support.
Authentication
An essential part of IAM is authentication, which proves a user’s digital identity. This can be achieved using a combination of something the user knows (such as a password) and something the user has (like a smartphone) or something the user is (like a thumbprint). This is known as two-factor authentication (2FA).
Once a user’s identity is established, IAM systems check to ensure they have access privileges for a specific piece of data or an IT resource. These privileges are pre-determined by the organization. For example, systems containing employee financial records should only be accessible by HR employees, while highly confidential company information might be restricted to the board of directors.
A key aspect of IAM is logging and monitoring to detect suspicious activity and respond quickly to security threats. Another element is governance, which involves assessing whether an access policy meets data protection regulations.
Finally, automation is a crucial component of IAM, reducing manual work and minimizing risk. For instance, Identity and Access Management tools like single sign-on reduce the number of passwords users need to remember and help them gain quicker, safer access to the systems they need for their job. IAM also helps organizations manage access across cloud services and platforms by delivering risk-aware policies that follow the user, ensuring their devices, locations, and behavior are considered.
Access
IAM provides a framework to manage who has access to what securely. It enables companies to meet industry regulations, like GDPR or HIPAA, and ensures employees can work with external partners and customers without exposing sensitive data. It also enables a better user experience by allowing users to have one set of credentials (like username/password and biometrics) for all applications under SSO, eliminating the need to remember multiple passwords.
In addition, it helps bolster security by allowing IT administrators to automatically monitor and control access from a central dashboard for any changes or suspicious behavior.
As mentioned, some IAM tools offer separate methods and policies for privileged access management (PAM), a process of managing permissions for highly privileged accounts. These are accounts that, if stolen by hackers, could allow them to take complete control of your systems, networks, and infrastructure. PAM solutions allow you to control and secure these accounts using credential vaults, just-in-time access protocols, and other security features.
IAM solutions also provide visibility into entitlements and help streamline the process of changing a user’s access to reflect a job change or a new device. This is especially important in hybrid environments where your organization has both on-premises and cloud systems with varying levels of security.
Authorization
Managing authorization is crucial to keeping information and applications secure. The process of deciding, granting, and changing access privileges varies by business, industry, and company size, so it is essential to have a strong security framework in place.
This can include implementing a risk-aware authentication system that increases user login requirements based on their device, location, and behavior and an endpoint protection solution that integrates across identities and systems. This helps mitigate risks by ensuring that only authorized users access sensitive data.
It’s also necessary to have a robust governance process to enforce policies and monitor and report on them. For instance, when an employee leaves your organization, it is essential to have processes in place to terminate their corporate account and close all access points to your internal information systems, as they could attempt to steal valuable data on their way out the door.
Finally, it’s critical to have a process to manage information sharing with third parties. For example, some businesses must share data with managed service providers to migrate their applications to the cloud or work on other IT projects. An authorization management system can help to ensure that these third parties are only given the access required for their specific project.
Governance
IT governance processes are crucial to the success of any company. Without them, cyber threats could go unchecked and cost the organization more money. Finding ways to improve value creation can also be challenging if a company’s IT environments are not appropriately managed.
Governance management ensures that a business’s IT operations are aligned with its strategic objectives. It helps the business understand where to spend its time and resources to achieve its goals. It also ensures that the business has the right people in place to make the right decisions at the right time and holds those people accountable for the consequences of their actions.
To manage IT assets effectively, governance must involve many stakeholders in decision-making. These include board members, executive managers, employees, and customers. This way, everyone understands the IT goals and how they achieve them.
IAM tools are designed to give companies a single digital identity for all their IT users, whether they’re human (employees, contractors) or non-human (IoT devices, bots, automated workloads). It can also allow businesses to get more granular with permissions than just granting access to systems and data. IAM can also apply role-based access control (RBAC) to allow or block access to specific data based on predefined job roles and the types of tasks they perform.