Data security is critical to enterprises of all types and sizes. Companies prioritize high levels of data protection to avoid financial loss, brand damage, and regulatory fines and lawsuits.
One of the best ways to prevent security breaches is through access management best practices like multifactor authentication and implementing a robust identity governance process. This includes a robust auditing and reporting tool.
Monitor Access to Data
It’s essential to monitor access to your data to ensure that cybercriminals can’t exploit weak passwords or repetitive patterns of login credentials. Implementing a robust multifactor authentication system — including biometrics, SMS and email-based two-factor authentication, or third-party authenticators – prevents these hacking attacks by requiring more steps between users and their digital assets.
IAM solutions make establishing and enforcing identity and access management best practices at your business easy, helping you meet legal requirements. With automation, these tools can streamline workflows for onboarding and offboarding, providing and removing access to applications and reevaluating privileges as employees join or leave the company or change roles.
Role-based access control (RBAC) grants permissions based on filters and attributes that define your users, such as their name, title, department, or job function. This is ideal for granting permissions that vary by role within your organization, like a project manager who needs to access a collaborative tool differently from the team leader. Discretionary access control (DAC) is also helpful in granting granular, temporary permissions.
This is often used to provide contractors, partners, or vendors access. Access keys, which provide programmatic access to your cloud environment, should be assigned to individual identities and not shared among multiple people. They should also be stored securely in a hardware security module or critical management system to protect them from theft.
Apply the Principle of Least Privilege
This security principle requires administrators to grant users minimal privileges and elevate those privileges only when necessary. It’s a critical part of access management best practices and can be used for human users, applications, networks, databases, and more. It safeguards critical data and systems by condensing the attack surface, enhancing operational performance, simplifying auditing and compliance, and reducing the impact of human error.
Following the least privilege when creating accounts is crucial because it ensures all users begin their jobs with the minimum required permissions. This prevents employees from granting themselves higher levels of access to systems they don’t need, which can lead to unauthorized actions that put your business at risk.
Another important use of the principle is to limit the number of people with privileged access so that there’s less chance of someone leaking sensitive information to the media, putting your company at risk of legal and financial consequences. In addition, applying the principle can make it easier to track when a privileged account is compromised and take steps to mitigate the damage.
Another way to apply the principle is to implement a just-in-time privilege elevation measure that allows you to expand or elevate a user’s permissions on a case-by-case basis. This is especially important for privileged account management, as it helps ensure that only the correct person can access your sensitive data anytime.
Ensure Authentication
Authentication is the first step to ensure data security. It helps you verify that a user is who they say they are and that the device, app, or server they’re using is their own. This means multifactor authentication, password management, hardware tokens, and substantial repercussions for policy breaches. Encryption helps to protect sensitive files from being read or used by people who aren’t authorized to do so. It’s also helpful to use secure passwords that change regularly and are difficult for cybercriminals to crack.
The three core elements of data security are confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Authentication, access control, and auditing are essential for each area. Ensure that employees and vendors start their new roles with the appropriate permissions rather than waiting until they need it to create an exception.
This will help reduce the wasted time and resources, ironing out these unforeseen situations and ensuring that business processes work correctly. In addition, companies should conduct regular access audits and remove privileges that are no longer required.
This is especially important with the shift towards remote working and introducing device policies to avoid attackers gaining a foothold on company networks from compromised employee devices.
Restrict Access to Only What Is Needed
As a best practice, it is critical to ensure users, third-party users, devices, and robotic processes start with the minimum privilege required to complete their intended tasks. This will help to limit the damage of a breach, whether intentional or not. It also helps to ensure security protections and user experience don’t conflict.
In addition, it’s essential to regularly review access rights and revoke access that is no longer needed to limit privilege creep. For example, junior employees may need to temporarily grant themselves elevated privileges for a specific project, but those credentials should be automatically revoked after completing the task.
Additionally, to minimize the impact of malware attacks that infiltrate the system, it’s a good idea to restrict access to only what is needed. For instance, if an employee is infected by a phishing attack that gains system privileges, it’s unlikely to spread to other systems unless they have super admin or root access.
Similarly, rotating access tokens can help mitigate the compromised credentials’ effect. This process is similar to changing passwords, and it can be automated with IAM tools such as zero trust. A robust IAM solution will make implementing these security best practices easier. For instance, it will allow you to create groups for different roles and departments, simplifying the provisioning and deprovisioning of account privileges. This will also help to make it easier to enforce the principle of least privilege and to keep access privileges up to date as employees transfer between departments or leave the company.
Conclusion
In conclusion, implementing access management best practices is crucial for ensuring data security in today’s digital landscape. By following the principles of least privilege, strong authentication, and continuous monitoring, organizations can significantly reduce the risk of unauthorized access to sensitive information.
Regularly reviewing access privileges, conducting security awareness training, and implementing multi-factor authentication are also essential steps in protecting data from cyber threats. Furthermore, organizations must stay up to date with the latest security technologies and trends to adapt their access management strategies accordingly.
Ultimately, by prioritizing data security through effective access management practices, organizations can safeguard their valuable assets and maintain customer trust. Take action now and invest in robust access management solutions to protect your organization’s data from potential breaches.