Identity authentication and management are vital elements in your business operation. It has the ability to not only influence your bottom line but also affect how your company is viewed in the public eye.
In addition to providing your IT environment with increased security, it promotes easy access, enhances the user experience and improves employee productivity through automated provisioning.
More than anything else though…
Authentication assumes a critical part in your progressive digital perimeter. It helps in ensuring appropriate role management and executive compliance.
For a cyber enterprise to remain consistent, it’s a necessity to have identity authentication as the foundation for your identity and access management strategy.
3 Common access management and identity authentication challenges
Despite its advantages, most companies fail to reap the benefits of their authentication systems.
Why?
A majority of them fall flat in taking the necessary precautions that include comprehensive patching and log monitoring, admin management and network partitioning.
The shortage of an authoritative and centralised identity repository for users also creates a significant reconciliation challenge. It’s often found that more problems arise when privileges on systems lack or exceed access levels that were previously given and provisioned for.
Those who are assigned in giving approval to requests often lack significant insights into which employees need access to confidential data. Failure to monitor and distribute these duties only makes this problem worse.
Here are three major obstacles that are interfering with your company’s identity authentication:
1. Failing to deploy OTP identity authentication
In most cases, single-factor identity verification is the real culprit behind a plethora of enterprise-level data leakages. In fact, 61% of data breaches are caused by stolen credentials and the ability to access multiple accounts using a single password.
Regardless of how complex a secret code is, it is important to note that passwords by themselves demonstrate insufficient security against cyber attacks.
No matter how sophisticated your biometric system is, it will stumble when it serves as your only protection against hackers.
After all, no digital perimeter can asseverate a whole schmear of safety.
Online criminals will always look for inventive ways to attack your network and target administrator passwords. This is often done with brute force attacks through ransomware infections. There have been so many cases where attackers head into an unprotected desktop and manually execute the ransomware.
Adding another layer of security between your digital assets and databases will provide a stronger perimeter for your organisation and increase your chances of deflecting hackers.
Creating a robust digital parameter through identity authentication can discourage hackers from penetrating your business. They are far more likely to attack easier targets.
How mature is your organisation? Why not take the Identity & Access Management Maturity Assessment right ?here.
To help secure your enterprise you may want to consider installing a one-time password or OTP to your authentication systems. By simply using a one-time password, companies prevent a number of password-based attacks. These include, but are not only limited to replay attacks and password sniffing.
The biggest benefit of an OTP is the lifetime of the code, this usually ranges from 30 seconds to 2 minutes. This makes it a little harder for online criminals to perform transactions after hacking your password. At present, there are three forms of OTP code provisioning specifically the Tokey key, SMS OTP and Smart OTP. It will be up to your organisation to decide which one to opt for.
2. Falling short of complying with PAM standards
Privileged Access Management or PAM, is often considered as the world’s most extensive and esteemed information security management system framework.
But, what makes PAM solutions an ideal choice for identity authentication?
Its skill to safeguard users by providing control over password policies. PAM password vaults provide an added layer of command over administrators as well as comprehensive audit trails on privileged access.
The PAM framework is packed with multiple subcategories such as application access password manager, privileged session manager, super-user password manager, and shared access password manager. These all work together to monitor and respond to attacks.
When deploying PAM security, control is the key to managing, securing, and monitoring accounts. Often doing so can be challenging as it requires scalability, auditing, and balancing simplicity with security.
Convincing your team members to use the PAM solution will often pose a challenge since it requires different passwords for every account. There’s no doubt that this can be the cause of inconvenience and perhaps even some frustration ?
In order to improve the PAM standards and the identity authentication of your company, you need to use a solution that matches the use-case of your business. This will ensure that you are able to verify different users.
It’s advised that you distribute privileged access management solutions across a cloud environment. This assures efficacy throughout your organisation and allows safety against modern attacks.
3. Going pear-shaped in filtering outbound traffic
It is no secret that firewalls are the cornerstone of every business’ intranet security.
What is the most ideal practice in filtering outbound traffic? Egress filtering.
It’s important to note that it’s not fixated in safeguarding your network but instead, it’s focused on protecting other organisations’ networks.
Filtering egress traffic will help protect your company.
It enables you to restrict services in your internal networks, therefore, preventing data exfiltration. Data exfiltration is often unintentional and can result from numerous configuration errors including a misconfigured DNS or NetBIOS.
Egress filtering can be time-consuming, but executing this practice can dramatically reduce the damage of malicious incidents. In short, egress filtering outbound traffic will allow greater control and restrict the information that could potentially spur danger in your company’s network.
Key Takeaways
By identifying your organisation’s biggest weaknesses, you’re able to identify right-fit solutions to build a safer, more robust security system.
There is no doubt that it can often cause company-wide inconvenience and in some cases reduce employee productivity. That being said, when you weigh the cost of a data breach, perhaps those are a small burden to bear in the long run.
Find out how you can begin building a safer more robust security system today. Simply click the button below to get started ?
