Identity & Access Management Strategy: A Complete Overview

In this article, we'll discuss in detail the IAM strategy, its importance, and how to create an IAM strategy. By the end of this guide, you will gain a clear understanding of these crucial strategy concepts.

Identity and access management (IAM) plays a vital role in protecting your organization’s sensitive data by ensuring that only authorized individuals have access to the right resources at the right times. Without a robust IAM strategy, your organization could face severe security risks, including data breaches and compliance violations.

Therefore, by implementing IAM strategy, you can streamline user access, enhance security protocols, and reduce the risk of unauthorized data access. Further, a well-defined IAM strategy offers numerous benefits. It improves compliance with industry regulations, reduces security risks, and boosts overall efficiency.

Now, we will guide you through the essential steps to developing a robust IAM strategy tailored to your organization's needs.But before diving into identity and access management strategy details, let's start by understanding the basics. This way, you will be able to grasp the concept better.

What Is Identity And Access Management Strategy?

IAM strategies are a set of cybersecurity practices that involve the utilization/implementation of policies, procedures, and technology to manage digital identities and control access to resources. The primary goal is to ensure that only authorized individuals can access an organization's SaaS applications, data, and other resources. Also, restricting unauthorized users from accessing business resources further helps prevent security breaches.

Why Is It Important To Implement an Identity And Access Management Strategy?

Due to the absence of an effective identity and access management strategy, one can encounter significant challenges. Such as, it exposes your users and data to security risks, as the lack of proper user access control can lead to unauthorized access, data breaches, and security vulnerabilities.

Furthermore, organizations without a well-defined IAM strategy may find it difficult to adhere to industry-specific and regulatory compliance requirements, potentially resulting in legal and financial consequences.

Inefficiency is another notable issue, as manual management of user accounts, access permissions, and authentication can be time-consuming and burdensome, hindering the IT team's overall efficiency. This, in turn, may contribute to a poor user experience, with users(employees) facing difficulties in accessing the resources they need, leading to reduced productivity.

So, to mitigate these challenges, it's important to implement an effective IAM strategy. IAM provides the framework and tools to establish secure, compliant, and efficient access management systems. It ensures that only authorized users have secure access to specific resources, significantly reducing the risks of security breaches, data vulnerability, and compliance issues. Additionally, the IAM strategy helps your team simplify user access management processes, improves accountability, and streamlines other access management processes as organizations grow.

Now that you've understood IAM's importance, you may be eager to learn more about it and create a strategy that aligns with your business requirements. So, here'show you can build your own identity and access management strategy.

How To Create Identity And Access Management Strategy?

To create an identity and access management strategy that aligns specifically with your business needs, you have to follow the given below steps:

Step 1: Define your IAM objectives

• The first step to creating your identity and access management strategy is to define your objectives. This includes recognizing your organization's goals and how IAM can support them. For example, these objectives can include regulatory compliance, risk reduction, and enhancing user productivity. By defining your objectives, you can prioritize IAM efforts and focus on the areas that provide the most value.

Step 2: Track Your Resources and User Profiles

• Once you've established your IAM objectives, the next step is to identify all the IT assets and resources present in the organization, specifically those that require protection. This includes SaaS applications, data repositories, hardware devices, and network resources. An inventory provides a comprehensive view of your IAM requirements and identifies the resources that require extra security or the most robust protection.

Step 3: Establish IAM policies

• With your objectives and inventory in mind, proceed further and create IAM policies and procedures. These access policies should align with your organization's objectives and industry standards. They should include password policies, access control guidelines, and user provisioning and de-provisioning procedures.
• It is crucial that these policies are well-documented, communicated to stakeholders, and subject to regular review and updates to ensure they are relevant and effective even if any change occurs.

Step 4: Opt For Effective IAM Solutions

After setting up the IAM policies, your next step is to choose efficient and advanced IAM solutions that cater to your IT team's needs to help them streamline identity and access management processes. Look for a platform that puts more emphasis on authentication, authorization, and identity governance.

So, you can consider opting for an identity and access management platform that offers single sign-on (SSO) solutions, multi-factor authentication (MFA), identity and access governance (IAG) solutions, and identity and access administration (IAA) features. These features will help your IT team seamlessly control, manage, and govern your user access to the organization's SaaS app, data, and systems.

However, before you make your ultimate decision, cross-check once again whether it meets your organization's unique requirements, encompassing scalability, integration, and user experience or not.

Step 5: Evaluate and Enhance Your IAM Strategy

The final step involves testing your IAM strategy in a controlled environment. This evaluation should involve both your IT teams and end-users, covering all aspects of IAM, such as authentication, authorization, and user provisioning. Based on feedback from evaluation, you can enhance or improve your IAM strategy, making any necessary adjustments to ensure its effectiveness, efficiency, and alignment with your organization's objectives.

However, you should also include the key aspects listed below to create an effective identity and access management strategy.  

• Implement Incident Response Plan

An effective IAM strategy needs to have an incident response plan. This plan includes the protocols to be followed when unexpected security incidents occur. Also, state what is the process of responding to these incidents and explain how they should be managed.

The creation of an incident response plan should encompass defining the roles and responsibilities of the incident response team. It should specify who is accountable for testing and executing the plan. This ensures a coordinated and efficient response during a security breach.

• Conduct Regular Audits To Stay Compliant

To maintain the effectiveness of IAM processes and ensure compliance with relevant regulations and standards, your team needs to conduct regular audits. These audits offer valuable insights into any gaps within the IAM strategy, which can then be addressed to strengthen and improve the organization's security posture.

• Analyze Security Threats With The Help Of Risk Assessments

Risk assessments play a pivotal role in IAM strategy. It helps your IT team to identify potential security risks and vulnerabilities. Once recognized, these insights can be used to develop strategies to mitigate these risks. This further helps in securing critical SaaS app data against potential threats.

However, to implement these strategies, you require an effective identity and access management platform. Several options are available in the market, but the one that stands out from the rest is Zluri. What is Zluri? What functionalities does it offer to streamline the identity & access management process? Here's a quick read-through.

Zluri: Your Ultimate Solution To Effectively Implement  Identity And Access Management Strategy  

Zluri is a modern SaaS management platform that enables your IT team to seamlessly enforce identity and access management strategy. It ensures that only the right users have access to the organization's SaaS apps, data, and system, which further helps prevent security breaches.

Zluri is not only restricted to creating a secure access environment for your users and data; it also helps improve the efficiency and productivity of your IT teams and employees. How does it do that? It automates repetitive IT tasks, such as access granting, modifying, revoking, reviewing, and more. This way, your IT team no longer has to struggle manually managing these critical IT teams, and your employee(s) gain access to required applications within no time.

Moreover, manual methods are susceptible to errors and consume a lot of time and effort, which could have been utilized in other core areas. With Zluri, your IT team not only expedites IAM-related tasks but also maintains compliance with evolving regulatory standards. So, Zluri is the key to streamlined IAM, enhancing both security and operational efficiency in your organization.

There are other functionalities as well that Zluri offers. Let's have a quick look at them:

Securely Grants, Modify, And Revoke Access

Upon user's (employee) onboarding, Zluri ties the user's profile with digital identity, which further helps your IT team to assign the new employees roles. Once the roles are assigned successfully, your team can grant required application access based on their job title/role and responsibility.

But how does Zluri manage users' access upon mid-life cycle changes? Zluri integrates with your organization's HR system; via this integration, Zluri provides your IT team with updated user identity details in a centralized dashboard. For instance, if an employee shifts to a new department, Zluri will update the same on its dashboard. Accordingly, your IT team can modify the employee's access and revoke the access that is no longer required.

Additionally, for the convenience of employees during transition, Zluri offers an Employee App Store, which is a self-serve model. EAS is a collection of IT team-approved SaaS applications, so your employees can choose any application from this collection and gain quick access to it within no time upon the IT team's approval.

Lastly, when an employee's tenure ends, your IT team can swiftly revoke access from the departing employee without missing out on critical steps.

Provides Users Access To Only What Is Essential

Zluri helps your IT team ensure that only the right users have access to authorized applications with the right level of permissions at the required time. How does it do that? It implements different access security policies to manage and control user access, which is role-based access control (RBAC), the principle of least privilege access (PoPL), segregation of duties (SoD), and just-in-time access.

• Role-based access control- By implementing RBAC with Zluri, your IT team can assign individual users (employee(s)) access based on their roles and responsibilities to perform everyday tasks. By doing so, your IT team can ensure employees only have access to resources (apps, data, and systems) required for their job role, preventing unauthorized access attempts and insider threats.
• The principle of least privilege: With Zluri, your IT team can grant employees with minimal or limited access to SaaS apps, data, and systems. This way, your IT team can eliminate the likelihood of over-provisioning or granting excessive privileges.
• Segregation of duties: Zluri enables your IT team to prevent a conflict of interest by ensuring no single employee/user holds all the power and sole responsibility for specific IT tasks. This further helps ensure no partiality during decision-making by assigning different employees to manage different aspects of a task.
• Just-in-time access: Zluri securely enables your IT team to grant employees temporary or just-in-time access to required apps for a specific duration. This way, your team can reduce the attack surface caused by standing privileges. This way, your team improves employee experience by granting required timely access while maintaining security.

Actively Monitors And Analyses User Access

Zluri thoroughly tracks who can access what and checks if anyone has more access than they need. If it finds any issues or violations, your IT team can promptly change the user's access permissions, ensuring only the right users have the right level of access. This way, your IT team can prevent security breaches that may occur from employees holding excessive permissions.

That's not all; Zluri also sends real-time notifications if any users attempt to access apps not authorized to access as per their role. This alert enables your team to take immediate action, like restricting or suspending user accounts if required, to maintain a secure access environment.

Conducts Timely Audits

Zluri conducts regular/periodic access audits to make sure each employee has the necessary level of access permissions to SaaS apps, data, and systems. If there is any misalignment in their access permissions, your IT team and reviewers can run deprovisioning playbooks or modify access playbooks. By doing so, your team can revoke access from users not required for their roles or modify the access.

Furthermore, Zluri also records the entire review process and generates access logs/audit trails and reports to show as evidence to auditors that your IT team has enforced a secure access control policy effectively without fail.

By doing so, you can meet stringent compliance regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA, where data integrity is a crucial security requirement. This proactive approach aids in averting potential legal repercussions and financial penalties linked to non-compliance. Also, you can avoid getting into trouble and having to pay fines.

Now that you know how Zluri can be your ideal solution to streamline the user access management process, why wait any longer? Book a demo now and view all the other exquisite access management capabilities that Zluri offers.  

Also Read: 9 Robust Identity And Access Management Best Practises - Zluri