Key Findings from the Tools4Ever Blog Q1 2018

Identity governance and administration (IGA) solution providers do more than simply provide a product. They are on the front lines of identity security, innovating new ways to monitor digital identity permissions and role consistency and fighting back against hackers and insider threats alike. They know the identity industry trends and threats better than anyone.  

Therefore, we make a point to read through IAM and IGA vendors’ blogs and pulling out the key best practices we can learn from them. This time we read through the blog of Tools4Ever, a New York-based solutions provider specializing in identity governance and administration. Here’s what we learned from their blog posts in Q1 2018:

Why Educational Organizations Need Automated Reporting

Student data kept on college servers are often left unstructured and jumbled given how many access and permissions changes their identities undergo—making them a sincere compliance risk for governmental and education regulations.

Colleges and other higher education institutions have to worry about their reputations arguably even more than global enterprises. Without that reputation, attracting the top talent in students, faculty, and donors can be a far more difficult task…and a data breach can quickly spoil a prestigious reputation. An identity governance and administration solution can help solve that problem before it occurs.

Identity Access Management in Education

The Tools4Ever team has seen an uptick in the improvement of identity and access management platforms in higher education institutions’ networks. The growth of the IGA market has resulted in an expected decrease in prices via competition, allowing identity governance and administration to be accessible to small colleges. Larger institutions can expand their platforms and identity role monitoring platforms. IAM solution functionality has improved significantly in recent years, with innovations in automation, access governance, reporting, and password management contributing to providing better identity security to enterprises.   

At the same time, protecting student and faculty identities and data has become even more important with regulations putting more educational institutions under the microscope, driving them to select IGA solutions.

Attestation & Reconciliation – what is it and why do you need it?

Tools4Ever defines attestation as the ongoing review and confirmation processes that grant users the right permissions, evaluating the risks involved with their access, and reviewing potentially dangerous permissions. The idea is at the heart of identity governance and administration in its review and risk management functions.

In contrast, reconciliation is a process of verifying consistency and compatibility across the access control systems, also essential to compliance efforts. It scans for duplicate permissions and orphan accounts, and allowing for manual fixes to eliminate these errors. Reconciliation and attestation can both be automated, however, to save enterprises time and IT budgets. Both processes help answer the question of who has what access in your enterprise.

It should be noted that attestation and reconciliation work even better in the largest enterprises, which has to deal with hundreds if not thousands of access requests and permissions changes a day.