Problems Solved with Identity Management Solutions

What problems are solved with identity management solutions? How does identity management handle the challenges facing modern businesses in the digital age? 

Before you can find the right solution, you need to understand the problem you’re trying to solve. Ideally, you actually want to identify multiple problems which a single solution can solve; too many IT environments struggle under the unnecessary weight of too many solutions trying to solve individual problems. 

It’s often easy to dismiss cybersecurity because it appears to solve only a single problem. However, this stems from a misunderstanding; cybersecurity isn’t just one problem but a series of problems your enterprise faces every day. 

So what problems end up solved with the addition of identity management? 

Problems Solved with Identity Management Solutions

Problem: Privileges Are Out of Control

Unless your business is truly small, you don’t generally have your HR head making financial decisions. On a similar note, you don’t have your Sales Lead making changes to the IT department. Yet without proper control over your digital privileges, you might find blurred distinctions in your network. 

Not only is this a security issue – hackers love to target accounts with permissions beyond their job scope – it also can cause workflow problems as people interfere with processes outside the scope of their roles. 

Thankfully, these problems are solved through a combination of two identity management categories: identity governance administration (IGA) and Privileged Access Management (PAM). Identity Governance helps IT security teams discover redundant or unnecessary permissions on users’ accounts and remove them. Further, it can help with the onboarding process by setting every new account with exactly the permissions it needs, no more and no less. 

Meanwhile, PAM solutions help ensure that those privileged accounts stay secure through capabilities like session monitoring, multifactor authentication (MFA), and password vaulting. 

Problem: Logins Take Too Long

You sit down at your desk and log into your email. Then you log into your preferred inter-office communication app. Perhaps you log into your sales portal or web developer tool – wait, it’s asking you to log in again. Did you mix up passwords again? Maybe you need to reset it for this account. 

This long digression highlights how the average employee goes through their normal workday. Notice how long they need to log into every single application, database, and tool they use. It eats up time and leaves your enterprise vulnerable both to hackers (users tend to repeat passwords, which hackers exploit in various attacks) and to slowdowns (due to password recovery times. Also, the requirement to juggle so many passwords adds to stress levels among employees. 

Problems with logins end up solved by identity management and its Single Sign-In capabilities. Single Sign-On enables enterprises to allow their employees to log in once to gain access to all of their tools at once. This speeds up login times and reduces the number of passwords users need to remember, which in turn reduces the attack surface. Combined with multifactor authentication, Single Sign-On can prove the secure alternative that’s more efficient than the traditional practice. 

Problem: After Login, We Can’t Monitor Employees

Traditionally, enterprises put all of their security weight at the beginning of the IT interaction, at the authentication stage. This means that hackers that can get past that stage often have free reign of the entire network. 

Instead, you need an identity management solution that provides continuous monitoring over all of the users. These solutions create baselines for each identity based on their behaviors and monitor them for potential deviations. If it detects such a deviation, it can freeze the account and prompt an investigation. 

These just examples just scrape the surface of problems solved with identity management solutions. For more, check out the Identity Management, Privileged Access Management, and Identity Governance and Administration Buyer’s Guides. Alternatively, check out the Solutions Suggestion Engine.