Access Management

Access management has two purposes, that is to allow authorised users the right to use a particular service. The second one is to prevent unauthorised users from accessing a service.

You will often find access management bundled in with Identity Access Management (IAM). There are many different solutions for access management:

OneLogin,

Ping Identity

Okta

IAM works by defining and managing your employee roles and then granting each employee privileged access to the network resource that allows them to carry out their daily duties. IAM has been designed to make things easy, this means each employee will only need to use one set of network credentials to access your business network. Or, in simple terms, one password for everything.

In today’s always-connected world. If you don’t have an access management solution then each end-user will have to remember multiple login details. This invariably means lots of calls to helpdesk due to forgotten passwords.

Many businesses now have multiple applications that are hosted across multiple locations and that could either be as a private or public cloud.

IAM offers your business the following benefits:

IAM securely unifies end-user access across your on-premise and cloud applications. It will use a central directory, this is usually Microsoft Active Directory to ensure each user only has access and privileges to access data they need for work purposes.

IAM is normally used with Single Sign-on (SSO) This means end-users only have to remember one password and this allows them to access every application and network resource.

The purpose of IAM and SSO is to build a trusted experience for your users, customers and clients. By embracing a policy-driven security access solution your are ensuring the integrity of your data network.

As you will know cybercrime is on the increase and unfortunately your employees are the weakest link when it comes to data security. This means they need as much help as they can get. To aid this many IAM solutions also come with Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) included. MFA works on the basis of providing a one-time password or token. This means even if your password is compromised cybercriminals won’t be able to access your network if you have MFA installed. There is a wide number of MFA applications available for general use and the latest Microsoft 365 licences have this as standard.

Every time end-users try to login from a different location to your offices then it will ask for their password. This will then be authenticated against a one-time password (OTP) sent to your Smartphone or a hardware token. If it doesn’t match, you don’t get in. Each OTP only lasts about 15 minutes making this the best solution for access management.

One downside to MFA is the end-users can get really frustrated putting in a password to access network resources. One way around this is to allow a trusted device to log in to the network and hold a password for the day or until it is removed and used from a second location.