15 Reasons Why Identity and Access Management is Important?

IAM assures that your organization’s identity and access features remain secure.

IT admins can set required parameters, so that the system can easily detect suspicious user or employee activities.

Let’s go through the key points that explain the importance of identity and access management.

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#1. Secure Digital Identity:

One of the major features of identity management is to control user access & preserve their digital identity by avoiding the instances of data breaches, identity theft, and illegal access to valuable organization data.

#2. Aid in Maintaining Regulatory Compliances:

Organizations should stay aligned with all the latest compliances to meet the industry regulations.

This is where the importance of IAM comes in.

Organizations that leverage IAM can effectively enforce all compliances such as HIPAA, GDPR, etc.

Most IAM solutions come with these regulations, and hence, do not need manual attention on each of them separately.

This helps to save time and reduces the manual effort.

#3. Reduce Human Errors:

Installing an IAM solution in place helps the organization to cease manual privileges and permission settings that can sometimes lead to errors.

Because of IAM, the IT team does not have to manage access rights to user or employee accounts manually – the process will be automated.

#4. Confidentiality of Data:

Data confidentiality is one of the fundamental pillars of cyber security.

So, if you can restrict certain users from accessing the company’s digital assets, files, and applications, the organization can better secure sensitive data.

This can be achieved using the right IAM Solution.

It also facilitates project managers and security professionals to have a transparent view about the users and the associated projects or assets.

#5. Effective Ways of Accessing the Resources:

Because of IAM, all employees and users can have a centralized means of accessing resources.

This allows employees to use different mechanisms like multi-factor authentication framework, SSO technologies, and biometric means of authentication.

Also, through IAMs, admins can limit the number of interactions that users can have with security systems.

Such mechanisms help in decreasing the probability of experiencing illegitimate attempts.

#6. Single Sign-on Capabilities:

SSO helps to improve the user experience by enabling users to authenticate securely with multiple apps, platforms, services, and websites using one set of credentials.

It allows employees to set one login credential & authenticate themselves in a platform such as an email account.

Now, using those credentials, the employee can log in to multiple web apps and services.

Leveraging the Single Sign-On technique for authentication eliminates the hurdle of requesting multiple password resets.

SSO also eliminates the overhead of managing and remembering several unique passwords and login credentials for numerous services.

#7. Centralized Identity Store:

IAM becomes a one-stop solution for managing all the organization’s identity under a centralized database.

IAM manages unique arrays of identities (biometric, email, PIN, hardware tokens, etc.) for each employee.

Since IAM is a centralized system, it becomes easy for security professionals & IT admins to manage the identities easily without any error.

Because of this, it becomes easy to automate the provisioning and de-provisioning of roles and access rights to employees.

Since all the data resides in one central repository, the IAM solution can fetch and manage various automated tasks easily which otherwise becomes ineffective when performed manually.

#8. Seamless Resource Integrations:

During the acquisition of an organization by another organization, resource integration takes place.

Among these resources, the acquired organization’s identities & confidential files are also included.

Keeping these identities in multiple identity repositories can introduce an opportunity for human errors.

It might also enable excessive authority, inappropriate privileges, and improper access control to unauthorized users.

Therefore, to solve the problem, IAM plays a significant role.

IAMs can easily merge and manage multiple resources and identities without creating anomalies in access privileges & roles.

#9. Enables & Automates Recertification Efforts:

IAM enables organizations to implement access certifications and renewals to provide valid rights within different corporate systems and devices.

This process has become mandatory for security and compliance.

For example, SOX certifications are a must for organizations to ensure the financial reporting process is reliable.

Organizations that do not comply with these security and compliance certifications have to pay massive penalties.

By implementing IAM solutions, things like compliance checks and security updates become automated resulting in reducing human errors and negligence.

Using IAM, it is possible to assign a specific time interval (quarterly or half-yearly) to check whether all SOX applicable systems have been re-certified or not.

#10. Enhances an Organization’s Data Security Capabilities:

Typically, as the organization grows, its IT infrastructure often becomes complicated.

Devices keep on adding & employee identities increase.

Hence managing their security postures manually or through traditional tools becomes difficult.

Again, overlooking appropriate access rights and privileges can cause trouble for the organization in the long run.

But with the help of the right IAM security framework and proper strategy, organizations can take robust measures towards strengthening an organization’s risk management system and security posture.

Managing access privileges & security policies through IAM, guarantees lowering or eliminating the overall configuration time for implementing security measures.

Also, it ensures that the users have the right access privileges needed for their job.

#11. Creates Unique Identities for Each Employee/User:

Creating or generating unique identities for each employee or user can be a tiresome job.

To eliminate such issues, organizations should implement IAM solutions that can automate unique identities for all employees, users and contractors associated with the organization’s infrastructure.

Automatic provisioning and de-provisioning of employees with unique IDs & allocating them with required roles & responsibilities, providing them with the right privileges automatically reduces the manual efforts.

It also eliminates human error, making the organization system more secure.

#12. Supports an Organization’s Incident Management & Response:

Leveraging multiple incident response and incident management tools often makes the entire organization’s architecture complicated to manage by IT, admins and security professionals.

A complicated architecture with lots of incident management and response tools makes security professionals confused.

This gap can lead to security loopholes.

That is where IAM comes in as an effective solution.

Since IAM is a security framework, it comprises various incident response tools that can automatically detect internal and external threats in real-time and respond with a notification or prompt to the security professionals or IT admins.

Any kind of data breach or misuse of employee identity from different geolocation or IP address gets traced easily by the IAM.

#13. Authorized Account Automation:

Forgetting the password or losing authentication credentials and repeatedly asking for help from the IT team or raising tickets makes the IT team’s work more difficult.

Solving such issues manually becomes time-consuming and costly.

To mitigate such problems, organizations can use IAM solution.

IAMs can allow users to set up new passwords or other passwordless authentication mechanisms without human intervention.

Modern IAMs use criteria-based identity management by automating various workflows such as managing access requests, access certifications, provisioning, and password management.

#14. Potential Insider Threats Can Be Detected in Real-Time:

One of the major concerns for organizations in terms of security is insider threats.
Often organizations target to resolve external threats and cyber-attacks so that the employees can continue maintaining the normal workflow.

But it becomes very challenging to identify internal threats through typical security tools and techniques.

Security tools like IAM solutions come with modern technologies like machine learning (ML) algorithms to identify the internal threats and notify the security professionals for prompt actions.

#15. Facilitates Smoother Integrations with Native Cloud IAM Solutions:

The cloud-native architecture leverages the cloud-first model.

Modern apps and services prefer cloud services and storage over traditional on-premise servers and systems.

Therefore, managing security for native cloud apps and services using traditional tools might be difficult to manage.

With IAM solutions, it becomes easy to create smooth integration of various cloud-native services and platforms, keeping in mind the security postures.

IAM also ensures that the integrity and confidentiality of your application and data gets preserved when the organization is using native cloud apps and platforms.

Conclusion:

We hope this comprehension has given you a clear idea about why identity and access management is important.

So, every organization, whether large, medium or small, must leverage the benefits of IAM.

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