Security & Compliance

  • 13 min read

7 Identity & Access Management Risks

Team Zluri

18th February, 2024

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One crucial goal in the battle against cyber threats is to prevent attacks and minimize their impact. Yet, one often underestimated way to achieve this is to prevent attackers from gaining access in the first place. There is a process called identity access management through which your IT team can actually prevent attackers/unauthorized users from accessing your organization's SaaS app data, system, or network. 

However, it's important to be aware of the risks that can arise if identity and access management are not efficiently implemented.

Many common identity and access management misconfigurations can lead to security issues, such as granting users access to others' data and allowing them to log in from unauthorized/unapproved IP addresses, leaving APIs vulnerable; these misconfigurations pose significant threats. However, your IT team can overcome such risks by restricting API access, implementing role-based logins, and ensuring robust API security.

This was just an overview of risks associated with identity and access management; it doesn't end here; we have a lot to explore. So in this article, we will explore all the identity access management risks and also check out the solutions to mitigate them.      

7 Identity & Access Management Risks That Can Affect Your Organization's Security Posture

Your IT team will encounter various risks associated with identity and access management, so to assist them, here's a list of risks along with solutions to overcome them.

1. The Risk Posed By Lack Of Visibility Into User Access Data Risk

With the increase in SaaS adoptions and work decentralization, it has become more difficult for IT teams to gain complete visibility into SaaS apps and user access data. And what makes the situation more complex is IT teams rely on outdated manual methods and other inefficient solutions to gain insights into SaaS apps and users. This lack of visibility further poses a significant challenge for IT teams in efficiently managing user identity and access. 

What you as a manager can do in such a scenario is opt for a modern identity governance and administration platform such as Zluri. Why Zluri? Well, it offers a wide range of exclusive capabilities, including a data discovery engine, which can be a great help for your IT team to gain complete visibility into SaaS apps and user access data. How does Zluri's data engine work? 

Zluri uses five discovery methods, i.e., SSO or IDP, finance systems, direct integrations, browser extensions (optional), and desktop agents (optional). With the help of these methods, your IT team can gain complete visibility into SaaS app and user access data, including which user has access to which particular apps and data, which department and position they are from, what level of access permissions have (such as read, edit, or delete access permissions), their last active status, and more. 

Furthermore, with such granular insights, your IT team can effectively monitor the entire identity and access management process. 

2. Risk Posed by Manual User Access Management

Manually managing repetitive IT tasks can lead to errors and inefficiencies, burdening the IT team and impacting employee experience and productivity. Moreover, manual handling of user access poses data security risks as well. 

So, let's explore the different phases of a user's lifecycle where manual access management can be inefficient and how, with Zluri's automation engine capabilities, your IT team can address these challenges.

• Granting Multiple Employees Access To SaaS App Data Upon Onboarding
  
  Managing access effectively starts as soon as an employee joins a company, and the responsibility of providing the right access to the right applications on day one relies solely on the IT team. 
  
  However, if this process is done manually, IT teams may end up granting employees access to unrequired apps, and still, if they want to practice the manual method, they can only onboard one employee at a time. This provisioning approach can take a lot of time and affect the new joiners' overall experience. 
  
  So what Zluri does is; it automates the entire provisioning process, granting multiple new employees access with just a few clicks. By automating the process, your team can ensure the right access is granted to the right employees with the right level of permissions to necessary apps. That further boosts employees' productivity by enabling them to start working from day one.
  
  Also, it makes it more convenient for the IT team by tying user profiles with their digital identity during onboarding. So that when your IT team verifies user identity to grant them access during the provisioning process, they can simply cross-check the details from a centralized dashboard. Thus, this integration allows your IT teams to assign user access that aligns with their job role accurately. 
  
  Now let's move on and see how Zluri automates the provisioning process. Well, your IT team can create onboarding workflows. All they need to do is select users they want to grant access to or onboard and apps (you can even choose from recommended apps option), which all apps they want the users to access. 
  
  Then, your team can take necessary actions easily by clicking "add an action." Here, they can schedule the workflow and more. 
  

  

  

  Zluri even provides in-app suggestions, allowing your team to add employees to different channels, groups, or projects or send automated welcome messages.
  

  

  

  The actions can vary for different applications and are mentioned under recommended actions. Once all the actions are set, you can directly run the workflow or save it as a playbook for future use. 
  
  For added efficiency, Zluri offers automated playbooks (i.e., collections of recommended applications for automation) that can be customized for different roles, departments, and designations. This feature streamlines the onboarding of new employees, making it as easy as a few clicks to set up their access.
  

  

  

  Note- Apart from that; your team can set automation actions, such as by triggering if and but conditions, they can grant Kissflow access to all the finance department employees.  

• Manually Managing Access Requests 
  As employees' roles, departments, or positions change, their access requirements also evolve. Additionally, there are instances when they need access to new applications for specific projects. However, manually managing these access changes becomes challenging for the IT team, as they often struggle to identify the changes that have taken place. 
  
  The drawback of manual access request management doesn't stop here; the entire access request process goes through multiple steps, so employees have to wait for a long time to get the final approval, disrupting their entire workflow. 
  
  So what Zluri does is it eliminates the time-consuming manual access request process through automation. Let's see what it does. 
  
  To stay updated with the changes, Zluri integrates with HRMS. With the help of this integration, Zluri automatically retrieves and displays updated employee data on a centralized dashboard. By leveraging this integration, your IT team can easily access and verify employee details without manual effort. 
  
  This streamlined process ensures access permissions align with current employee roles and responsibilities. Whether granting or revoking access, your team can efficiently manage user privileges based on the most up-to-date information available.
  

  

  

  It doesn't stop there; Zluri takes a step further to streamline the access request process by making it ticketless. It offers an Employee App Store (EAS), a self-serve model, which is a collection of applications pre-approved by your IT team. With this self-serve model, employees enjoy the flexibility of choosing any application from the app store and gaining quick access in no time.
  

  

  

  All they need to do is raise a request, and the IT team will verify and review their identity before providing access to the requested application. If approved, employees gain access right away. If access is declined, they receive prompt notifications along with reasons for the decision, any modifications made, or suggested alternatives for the application, all viewable in the "Changelogs."
  

  

  

• Unable To Promptly Revoke Access From Departing Employees
  Revoking access from departing employees or those who no longer require certain application access is a critical task for IT teams. Even a single oversight in this process can potentially lead to security breaches, jeopardizing data security.
  
  Zluri recognizes this concern and provides a solution by automating the deprovisioning process. With just a few clicks, your IT team can effortlessly revoke the required or all access from employees without missing any crucial steps. This automation ensures timely and thorough revocation, safeguarding SaaS app data from potential security breaches such as unauthorized attempts.
  
  Furthermore, to automate the process, your team can simply create an offboarding workflow. All they need to do is select the users from whom they want to revoke app access, and then they will come across a list of recommended actions (such as signing out users, removing them from org units, and more). 
  

  

  

  Your team can choose one or multiple actions at once from the list; a point to note is that these actions will be executed post the deprovisioning process. Once all desired actions are added, your team can run the workflow instantly or save it as a playbook for future use.

3. The Risk Of Granting Employees Excessive Permissions

Excessive permissions in identity and access management occur when an employee(s)/user(s) is granted more permissions than required for their intended job function. When does it happen? 

These scenarios may occur unintentionally when IT teams manage multiple employees. Or when at times, access is granted to employees for future requirements (IT teams often adopt this approach to avoid repeatedly granting access whenever the need arises). However, this negligence can jeopardize the safety of data.  

To address this pressing concern, Zluri takes a proactive approach by implementing least privilege policies. This means that your IT team will grant employees only the limited and essential access permissions required to carry out their specific tasks. 

By embracing these policies, Zluri ensures a balance between data security and empowering employees to perform their work seamlessly, reducing potential interruptions and safeguarding your system from unauthorized access.  

4. Data Access Risk 

Data security is a top priority for most organizations, as the consequences of a data breach can be severe, including business disruptions, financial penalties, and reputational damage. So when does this data breach scenario occur? One scenario where data breaches can occur is in the context of data sharing.

To help you understand better, let's take a real-time example; as organizations have shifted towards cloud services, data sharing has become more convenient. However, this convenience brings forth a concerning risk, i.e., the challenge of regulating data shared outside the organization. IT teams struggle to trace data shared via third-party apps, potentially exposing sensitive information to unauthorized users.

So to counter this risk, Zluri offers your IT team data monitoring capabilities. This feature enables your team to easily trace data shared within and outside the organization, recognize critical data that could be risky to share, detect unauthorized access attempts, and more. 

Further, it sends real-time notifications/alerts to your IT teams on any suspicious access behavior, enabling them to take proactive measures to safeguard data from potential breaches.

It's not restricted to that only; Zluri's data monitoring also generates timely reports, providing your IT teams with valuable insights into users' data-sharing activities. By staying informed about which users are sharing data and the frequency of such sharing, your teams can assess whether data sharing is necessary for their work or poses a security risk. Armed with this information, your IT teams can easily maintain a secure data environment. 

5. Risk Of Irregular Audit/Access Reviews 

Regular audits are crucial for IT teams to prevent the oversight of lurking access and maintain effective user permissions management. However, conducting access reviews manually through spreadsheets and JSONs won't be efficient and will consume productive time and effort. Further, this may also lead to inaccuracy in reports. 

So what Zluri does is it streamlines the access reviewing process with the help of its access reviewing capabilities. To help you understand better how it works? Let’s look into each of its features: Zluri’s unified access review feature allows your IT team to identify which users have access to all SaaS apps and data. Where does Zluri get all these insights from? Well, it has an access directory where all the user access-related data is stored in one central place. 

Further, with the help of these insights, including whether the users are admins, regular users, which departments they belong to, and more, your IT team can examine the access privileges of users and ensure their access aligns with the roles. 

Additionally, to keep things running smoothly, Zluri’s activity & alert capabilities come into play. This feature provides real-time information about the last activities users performed and notifies IT teams about any new logins. With the help of these insights, reviewers can make quick and informed decisions during access reviews, ensuring the right people have the right access at all times.

It doesn't stop here, Zluri enables your IT team to automate the entire access review process. Just go to Zluri’s IGA interface, create a certification, select the apps and users you want to review. Once the reviewers review the access rights, the platform will update you about the compilation via email. 

So, by automating this process, you get 10 times faster results than manual methods and save your IT team's efforts by 70%. Now let’s move ahead and see how it works. 

Once you have gained access to contextual data through Zluri’s unified access feature, you can step further by creating access rules around these insights. For example, if someone is an admin on Salesforce, you can easily set up a review policy specifically tailored to that scenario.

Next comes the schedule certification feature, where you can create certifications based on the gathered information. This allows you to take action based on the insights you've gained. For instance, you can use data like last login, departments, user status (active or inactive), and more to make informed decisions during the review process, such as whether the user can carry on with the existing access or need any modification.

With Zluri's context-rich information, your team can confidently take actions that align with your access management policies. It's a smarter, more efficient way to ensure the right access for the right users, all while keeping your data secure. Zluri's automated access reviews and access rules are the key to simplifying your access governance process.

Here’s how you can create access certification in Zluri:

Step 1: From Zluri’s main interface, click on the ‘Access Certification’ module.

Step 2: Now select the option ‘create new certification.’ You have to assign a certification name and designate a responsive owner to oversee the review. 

Step 3: Under Set Up Certification, choose the  ‘Application’ option. Proceed further by selecting the desired application for which you want to conduct the review and choose a reviewer (generally the primary reviewers are the app owners) accountable for reviewing access to that particular application. 

After that, you need to select the fallback owner/reviewer, if the primary reviewer is unavailable, the fallback owner can review the user access (you can select anyone for the fallback reviewer, whom you think is responsible enough). Also, the reviewers will get notified through the mail that they will conduct a review. 

Once you are done selecting the reviewers, you can click on Next.

Step 4: Select Users for Review, choose the users whom you want to review for the selected application. Once you are done selecting the users click on next. You will be able to view all the information related to the users. Then you need to specify the criteria or parameters such as user department, job title, usage, and more. Now click on update and then click on next.

Note: Select those relevant data points only that you wish your reviewers to see while reviewing the access. By filtering the criteria appropriately, you enable your reviewers to make swift and well-informed decisions, streamlining the review process and ensuring efficiency.

Step 5: Now the Configure Action page will appear, basically, here you have to choose actions. These actions will run post the review. 

There are three actions:

Approved- once reviewers approve the user access, Zluri won't run any action, the users can continue with their same access without any interruption.

Rejected- when the reviewer declines or doesn’t approve the user access, you have to run a deprovisioning playbook to revoke the access of that application from the user. If the user has access to critical apps then you can request the assigned reviewer to manually deprovision the user access or else Zluri will auto-remediate if it’s not critical access. 

Modify- In this last case; you again need to create a playbook to modify the user access. However, you need to state whether the access permission needs to be upgraded or degraded. 

Step 6: Additionally, you can even schedule the actions by setting up the start date and within what time span you want the review to be completed.

Step 7: Lastly you can keep track of the automated access review process by clicking on the ‘Review Status’ and view whether the review is still pending, modified, declined, or approved.

Also, you can add multiple applications and follow the same process for each selected application.

Zluri also provides the owner access to a snapshot view of the entire certification process status. Also, they can get an overview of the pending reviews and monitor the status of each app’s review, including their assigned reviewers and their completion status.

You can even send reviewers reminders who are yet to complete their reviews.   

Further to streamline the process for reviewers, Zluri provides reviewers with all the user access data in a single screen, i.e. reviewer screen. For the same screen, reviewers can approve, modify, and decline access by verifying the data, and also they have to add relevant comments on the same.

Now, you will be able to view the entire status of the review process on the chart and once the process is completed and the owner (assigned reviewer of the certification process) is fine with the review. You can click on conclude and it will straight away send the reports to the reviewers' email. 

6. Data Security Risk Due to Poor Access Management Policies

The absence of proper access management policies can severely impact data security. Without well-defined access policies, controlling access to data and critical applications becomes challenging, leaving the organization vulnerable to various security vulnerabilities and risks.

For instance, without appropriate access policies, individuals who should not have access to certain data or applications may gain entry, leading to potential data breaches and jeopardizing sensitive information.

Another example can be if the access policies are not set properly, there are chances of not being compliant with data protection laws and industry regulations, exposing the organization to legal consequences and financial penalties.

However, with Zluri, you can mitigate this risk by effectively setting access policies. By doing so, your IT team can ensure the right employees have access to the right applications with the required permissions that align with their job. This further helps in ensuring data security and helps meet compliance standards.

Additionally, Zluri conducts regular access reviews to monitor the access process. If any user activity deviates from the set access policies, Zluri initiates auto-remediation actions, such as it runs a deprovisioning playbook to revoke access if users' access does not meet the access criteria or modify access with the reviewer's intervention. 

Note: For critical data, Zluri enables manual review and remediation of access to ensure extra scrutiny and control.

7. Account Credibility Risk

The account credibility risk is one of the most common concerns while identity and access management. When does it occur? It generally arises when the IT team allows a user(s) with no (or non-existent) credentials to access an organization's SaaS app and data, that too without properly verifying their identity. Also, this risk occurs more frequently due to the increasing use of cloud services, where users can access resources easily from anywhere. 

So to mitigate this risk, Zluri implements robust authentication methods, including multi-factor authentication (MFA), in which users have to verify their identity in multiple ways. Such as along with passwords, users might be asked to enter a code sent to their email, scan a fingerprint, or answer a secret question. This helps ensure a higher level of protection by adding an extra layer of security.

Additionally, Zluri offers the convenience of single sign-on (SSO), enabling users to access different applications with a single set of credentials. By reducing password fatigue, this feature enhances user experience and reduces the risk of security breaches and chances of unauthorized access.

But that's not all! Zluri offers additional capabilities like integration and reporting features. Zluri’s integration features are quite beneficial at the time of gathering access data. Though Zluri already has data within its platform, but integration allows it to gather even more valuable insights. Leveraging these integrations, further enhances your access review process and strengthens the organization's overall security posture.

For example, the top priority for the company is to review the Identity System and core applications, as they pose the highest risk. The Identity System stores crucial employee data and requires timely and thorough reviews to ensure security. So what Zluri does is it integrates with Salesforce, Okta, Azure, and other applications. Further, these integrations play a crucial role in gathering identity system and SaaS app data, providing valuable insights and streamlining the review process.

Additionally, Zluri generates reports that are commonly associated with audit logs or audit trails. These audit reports serve as valuable documentation to share with auditors or keep as a reference for future reviews. And, audit trails act as roadmaps, showcasing the changes made during previous reviews.

Now that you're aware of the identity and access management risks that can impact data security and understood how Zluri can be the perfect IGA solution to mitigate those risks. So why wait any longer? Book a demo now and witness how with Zluri, your IT team can seamlessly govern user access by ensuring that users have the right access aligned with their roles and responsibilities, mitigating potential security risk

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Team Zluri

Team Zluri