What is Identity and Access Management (IAM) Governance and its Functions?

Data incidents continue to plague companies, and industry standards organizations are increasing their compliance requirements to ensure data privacy and security. Maintaining Identity and Access Management (IAM) compliance includes Governance software that helps the organization protect data privacy while managing an increasingly complex digital and cloud-based IT infrastructure.

More Info: EC-Council Certified Chief Information Security Officer (CCISO)

Governance frameworks are needed to fulfill IAM’s commitment to consistently support business users’ access needs without affecting the security or breaching.  Governance helps organizations solve this problem by enabling communication, by promoting a genuine understanding of the needs and the technology offered by all key stakeholders.

What Is Identity and Access Management?

Identity and access management (IAM) determine who a user is and what they are permitted to do. IAM only provides the access and handling of sensitive information by individual users in the organization. If there is no IAM, anybody can access sensitive business files, leading to potential data violation. IAM assists businesses in this regard to comply with rigorous and complex data management regulations. IAM is referred to as IDM (IDM). It is an IT branch that examines the identity of users and controls their digital access resources. IAM is a collective term covering products, processes, and policies to manage and maintain the organization’s user identities and regulate user access within the organization.

The important component of identities in an organization is one of the reasons IAM gains traction. An identity allows users to do their job by providing them Wi-Fi access, networks, file servers, applications, and other digital assets. IAM extends to identify, authenticate and authorize people to use IT resources and access hardware and applications.

What Is IAM Governance?

Any identity and access management (IAM) program must include Governance. An IAM governing body establishes and oversees all essential IAM functions, policies, procedures, and standards. The guiding principles that decide who has access to what information in an organization is known as access governance. With the ever-changing IT environment involving various distributed technologies, Establishing IAM governance entails forming a committee of people with authority to prioritize, create, enforce, and track IAM-related tasks and objectives, who meet regularly and make decisions.

Besides the guidelines, access management also requires the monitoring mechanisms necessary to assess each user’s access and use rights continually and detect defects.

Importance of IAM Governance

Due to the pandemic, employees are remote working, and cyber criminals could attack increasingly vulnerable business systems. Organizations whose identity and access management systems are designed poorly or regulated became common cyber attackers’ common aim.

◉ Identity governance is a crucial aspect for reducing vulnerability related to identity and creating policies to manage accessibility compliance in such a long-lasting situation. We need these two things now more than ever to meet the challenges of business safety post-COVID-19.

◉ Without proper Governance, organizations fall at risk. Identity and Access Management Governance helps organizations to keep and monitor the lifecycle of their employees.

◉ Access requests will comply with the policies and regulations of the companies. An automated process can improve efficiency, productivity, and safety.

Functions of IAM Governance

As organizations adopt IaaS, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to simplify operations and increase customer interaction, they face a range of new problems relating to identity and access governance:

1. Governance committee

The formation of an IAM governance council, primarily composed of stakeholders responsible for developing IAM policies for the organization, is the first step in establishing an IAM program. This council must be authorized to implement risk-mitigation policies that are widely visible throughout the organization.

2. Role-based access

Governance implies that an organization is aware of who has access and why and who is responsible for adding and deleting an entry. The role management includes periodic review of roles, ensures that entitlements are correct, updates roles according to policy changes, remove roles if necessary. Several companies still depend on role-based access controls that lack context. Industry and regulatory enforcement requirements increasingly include attribute-based access controls, which have other user attributes, such as location and resource.

3. Visibility is essential

The more cloud services your company integrates into the infrastructure, the less control you have over who has access to what resources, how they use them, and why they need them.

4. Authority

Assigning decision-making to those with governing authority supports organizations in promoting and enforcing more accountability in IAM policies and procedures. The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) has to make decisions with operational and risk considerations.

Benefits of IAM Governance

1. Providing access to the organization in an effective manner

Identity access governance allows your users quick and effective access to the resources they need to operate. It is made possible by using tools. It enables them to be productive, whether they change their responsibilities.

2. Changes in business

Organizations are continually growing and changing. Identity access will improve efficiency and make these changes less risky, since Governance can grant access based on roles and not on individual accounts. By automating and simplifying provisions and approvals, identity access management can significantly reduce time-frames for carrying out user accounts transitions. It is important to accurately and intuitively develop roles.

3. Risk management

Identity Access Governance adopts a proactive approach to reduce sensitive data exposure by strictly restricting and protecting access and reducing environmental risks. It enables a robust approach to manage and regulating access and follows the concept of least privilege, removing unnecessary rights and only giving access to those who require it to do work.

Best Practices to Set Up a Governance Committee

When establishing an IAM governance committee, the following are the best practices:

◉ Agree on key goals and priorities available.

◉ Include important owners and managers, including HR, Legal, Privacy.

◉ Identify measurement metrics for defined objectives.

◉ Get Executive Support from key management, such as CRO, CISO, CIO, CEO.

◉ Make sure that the purposes of the Committee are associated with organizational priorities, including digital transformation.

Governance aims to create a structure that includes structured principles and best practices and a multidisciplinary framework that considers its diverse nature. An effective IAM system relies on an ongoing commitment to administrative, technical, and security privacy controls.  The challenge is to provide access to the ID & Access Management Governance safely.

Source: eccouncil.org