On Identity Management Day, it's time for businesses of all sizes to take the our workforce identity audit.
Saying the pandemic changed the way we work is an understatement. While the world has adapted to different forms of work—remote, hybrid, and work from home—workforce identity and access management has been pushed into the limelight.
Workforce Identity and Access Management is a system to manage the identity of employees and partners in an organization and provide secure access to organization resources such as applications, devices, and networks.
Why is Identity and Access Management important now?
Every year, Verizon releases the Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). The 2021 DBIR found that 85% of data security breaches involved a human actor and 61% of breaches involved credentials. The report cited privilege abuse as a top cause for security incidents.
Security incidents and data breaches are not one-off events. They often result in serious financial loss to organizations. Reports of breaches have been increasing since the pandemic started. You might have heard about the graphic chip maker NVIDIA security breach which resulted in the data leak of more than 70,000 employees on the internet.
Besides addressing looming cybersecurity threats, the right workforce identity management controls provide a better experience for your employees and partners, who now toggle between multiple cloud applications and work from different locations.
We are a small business, should we be concerned about Identity and Access Management?
Security incidents affect all organization sizes, geographies, and industries. SMBs are especially vulnerable to security threats, and can be heavily impacted by attacks. Regardless of the size or location of your organization, it is important that you assess your workforce security now.
This Identity Management Day, we have created a questionnaire for business owners, CIOs, and IT admins, which you can self-administer to see if your organization has all the elements of a strong workforce identity management system in place.
Take me to the Workforce Identity Audit
The Workforce Identity Audit will introduce you to aspects of workforce identity such as:
Single Sign-On (SSO) - a system to access all your apps with a single set of credentials.
Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) - a system that adds additional authentication factors such as biometrics on top of traditional password-based authentication.
User Behavior Analytics - a system to audit and analyze your employees' actions to find and prevent suspicious activity.
Security Policies - policies to enforce strict security requirements such as password expiry and IP restriction on your employees.
User Provisioning and Lifecycle Management - a system to automatically create, update, and delete user accounts across all apps, managed by a central identity provider.
While our Workforce Identity Audit is comprehensive on many fronts, it is only meant to be a starting point for building a secure workplace and remote experience for your employees. You may be familiar with some of the covered topics, some may have been on your radar, while others may be entirely new to you. The goal is to create a frame of reference for your workforce identity protocols. Let this Identity Management Day be a starting point for secure and engaged work environment.
Assess My Organization's Workforce Identity Now
Reference: verizon.com/dbir/
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