Luca Muliere – Lead Security Architect in Cybertech

Matteo Re – Project Manager in Cybertech

1. How to face new identity and access challenges 

Today, organizations across all sectors have to face new identity and access management challenges caused by the intense technological evolution and the highly complex business scenario’s. The current intense proliferation of smart-working is forcing CISO’s, CIO’s and Risk Managers to review their IAM (Identity & Access Management) strategies in order to strengthen the security of new business processes while ensuring operational excellence.

The dynamic nature of business, the exponential growth of Cloud applications and the new standards and regulations, have created the need for an automated and centralized system that can simplify the management of all identities in the organization and ensure a minimum security standard to protect the organizational assets.

2. The main 4 concerns of all Security Managers when it comes to managing identities and access permissions, are:

1. “Who has access to what”?
2. “What privilege level does each identity have”?
3. “Who authorizes the access and why?”
4. “Is the access compliant to the security policies?”

In this scenario, applying an efficient and secure management of identities is becoming as fundamental as the core business of the organization. Considering the high increase in cyber-attacks in the past years, all companies are forced to a new day-to-day practice, a constant review of “who can do what?” and “why?”.

3. The evolution of Identity Access Management

Through the years, Identity Management has evolved into Identity Governance, moving from a technological implementation to a more comprehensive business-oriented management of identities including accesses and related processes. Today, the value of Identity Management and the impact of the related risks is clear to all security managers, that in fact, use specific tools to effectively govern and supervise identity and access lifecycle.

4. What is the most effective Identity Governance strategy 

An effective Identity Governance strategy supports business growth by simplifying identity and access management, by accelerating the response time to auditors, and by providing a continuous and real-time visibility of identities and authorizations. Furthermore, Access Management reduces the risk of improperly managed permissions by applying the Principle of Least Privilege, granting the subject’s only those privileges needed for them to complete their tasks.

Managing change through automation is key.  A centralized Identity and Governance solution with a business activity based approach allows organizations to create a highly efficient user life cycle management by incorporating human factors to enable the prevention and the limitation of human error.

5. Trust the best solutions on the market

We trust IBM Identity Governance and Intelligence solution, one of the best IGA solutions on the market, that enables a detailed and a real time overview of business identities while effectively addressing the main identity governance concerns. Moreover, it enables a full and continuous visibility of the permissions, to evaluate the impacts through a centralized console and to reach business and IT goals by simplifying permission management, reducing and controlling risks, accelerating Audit reporting, managing security processes, and ensuring compliance with the latest standards and regulations.

Identity and Governance strategy is the foundation of a secure business infrastructure, it enables the orchestration of the User Lifecycle for different types of identities (customers, partners, employees and so forth) and allows access to a variety of service interface types (e.g. API, mobile, web), deployed on complex infrastructures (such as mixed on-premise, multi cloud and private cloud environments).