Best Practices for Effective Identity and Access Management Implementation

Implementing best practices for Identity and Access Management (IAM) is crucial to enhance security and mitigate risks in an organization. It ensures a structured and efficient approach to managing user access, reducing the likelihood of unauthorized access and potential security breaches.

Ultimately, effective IAM implementation safeguards sensitive data, streamlines access controls, and contributes to overall cybersecurity resilience.

“Secure Paths, Smart Access: Elevating Business with IAM Best Practices.”

Following these practices also helps organizations align their IAM strategies with business objectives, maintain compliance with regulations, and foster a culture of security awareness among users.

 1. Treat Identity as Primary Security Perimeter

Organizations should shift from the traditional focus on network security to consider identity as the primary security perimeter. With the explosion of cloud and remote working culture, network perimeter is becoming increasingly porous, and perimeter defense can’t be effective. Centralize security controls around user and service identities.

2. Enforce a Strong Password Policy

Your IAM technologies are only as strong as the identity management best practices and policies that support them. If your team is leveraging single sign-on (SSO) tools, it’s critical that each user’s password is strong, unique, and difficult to guess to support password and IAM best practices. Passwords must be complex enough to deter cyberattacks, frequently changed, and not used for multiple sign-on requirements. 

3. Enforce MFA

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)is the first step in creating layers of trust. In addition to revealing a credential known only to the user (usually a password), there are two additional layers of authentication:

• Something they have

• Something they have inherited

Something they have could be a key or a security pass. Inherited factors mean biometric information such as retina scans, fingerprints, or voice recognition.

Something they have inherited usually refers to a fingerprint scan, facial recognition software, or any other kind of biometrics that let you log in.  

Multifactor authentication means that if one factor is compromised, an infiltrator still has at least one more barrier to breach before successfully breaking into your system.

Other authentication factors include location and time, meaning that you can only access systems at certain places or at certain times of the day. The more factors you use, the more effective your IAM policy will be.

4 . Adopt a Zero-Trust Approach to Security –

The best strategy in the dynamic setting of modern business networks is to presume that no one is trustworthy unless proved otherwise.

The zero-trust model assumes every access request as a threat until verified. Access requests from both inside and outside of the network are thoroughly authenticated, authorized, and scrutinized for anomalies before granting permission.

5. Secure Privileged Accounts

Securing privileged accounts is imperative to protect critical business assets. Limiting the number of users having privileged access to the organization’s critical assets reduces the chance of unauthorized access to a sensitive resource. You must isolate the privileged accounts from the risk of being exposed to cybercriminals.

6. Conduct Regular Access Audits
Organizations must regularly conduct access audits to review all the granted accesses and check if they are still required.

Regularly reviewing access logs adds an extra layer of security to your cloud. You can see who accessed what and when. This can help you keep track of your users’ activity and determine actions taken on the account and the resources.

About DVrtta

We are a leading Identity and Access Management service provider who stayed ahead of the pack by providing the best IAM services to customers since day one. We have successfully delivered 20+ IAM / IGA projects. We offer a seamless experience with integration across all cloud applications. Have questions? The consultation is always free.

Email contact@dvrtta.com