Although malware can seriously damage an organisation, identity is where the true risk lies. When hackers possess the credentials of your employees, they can inflict a damaging blow by leaking consumer data or proprietary information, stealing funds, or disrupting business operations. This makes it important to use optimised identity and access management or IAM systems and optimise your IAM strategy. Below are some tips to help you with this:
Ditch the Legacy IAM Solution
You don’t need to have many solutions staked on top of one another to improve your data security. Older IAM solutions and systems can be expensive to maintain and may not effectively protect your business against identity threats. A lot of IAM solutions can cause integration problems that allow more threats to bypass your security policies. You can optimise your IAM strategy by regularly re-evaluating your existing solutions to see if they are protecting you and your people.
Optimise your IAM Workflow
Your organisation should decide how to define optimisation when it comes to IAM. Do you need greater workflow efficiency and accuracy? If so, it makes sense to automate your workflow. If you want to save on IT cybersecurity costs, consider limiting the automated processes to alleviate some of the costs and complexities in the IAM systems. You must consult with your IT team to determine what can be handled manually and see what solutions you can get to streamline IAM workflows.
Enable Two-Factor Authentication
To optimise your IAM strategy, let your employees retrieve their passwords automatically through two-factor authentication. This will reduce the workload of your help desks as they don’t have to attend to requests for password resets from employees. This authentication solution ensures the validity of password resets. Invest in IAM solutions that help make sure hackers don’t pose as employees to steal their credentials.
Introduce the Best IAM Hygiene Practices
Your IAM solutions will only work when your employees treat their credentials carefully. Thus, you need to educate them to recognise phishing campaigns, create stronger passwords, and use two-factor authentication. Get them involved in protecting your business’ data. This is possible by making IAM best practices as part of regular employee reviews. In fact, you can incentivise good digital hygiene such as rewarding employees who can catch phishing emails and alert the cybersecurity team. Just make sure you make your employees’ experience as pleasant as possible so you don’t end up turning them off. Take the time to determine where your IAM policies are causing undue stress.
