How do you manage the increasing demands on data protection and IT security in a world full of mobile devices, cloud services and online platforms? The answer lies in Identity and Access Management (IAM), which not only fulfils legal requirements, but also offers strategic advantages and greater efficiency for companies.
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The secure handling of digital identities
With the emergence of new mobile devices, the shift of business processes to the cloud and a constantly growing number of online services, the demands on data protection and IT security are also increasing. Legal requirements are increasingly demanding an identity and access management system. At the same time, companies must protect themselves against unauthorised access to sensitive company data, including data misuse and identity theft. Without a central configuration interface, as provided by an IAM system, it is becoming increasingly difficult to monitor the resources assigned to a user and, if necessary, to analyse and create reports.
Targeted assignment of rights
In companies without a company-wide IAM system, access rights often accumulate unintentionally. In the event of restructuring or internal transfers, the old authorisations are often forgotten to be removed. Even when employees leave the company, old user accounts are often not deleted or only partially deleted. An IAM system then takes over this task. Formerly used accesses are removed and tidied up immediately after the departure to prevent unauthorised access. This relieves the IT department and allows it to concentrate on its own IT operations.
Compliance with legal regulations
Identity management can be used to enforce company-wide requirements, which are often derived from legal regulations (e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) in the USA, Basel II in Europe). Violations lead to a loss of reputation for the company concerned and, in the worst case, to fines.
Strategic advantages through identity management
IAM solutions enable standardised user administration and make a significant contribution to improving the quality of user and authorisation data through automation and data synchronisation. They offer the advantage that cross-platform reporting functions provide information that would otherwise not be available. This can be particularly relevant from a security perspective when it comes to looking at correlations between a user’s access authorisations in multiple systems.
