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The Coronavirus Identity Management Survival Guide for Businesses

Identity Management Lessons from the UC San Diego Health Attack

The Coronavirus Identity Management Survival Guide for Businesses

Welcome to the new era of coronavirus identity management. As this pandemic continues to wreak havoc across the world, businesses face a problem unlike any faced before; namely, how to maintain a consistent layer of identity security over a completely remote workforce. 

The coronavirus outbreak requires both a different mindset and a new set of cybersecurity tools. As the editors of Solutions Review, we dedicate our energy and expertise to helping enterprises make sense of their cybersecurity needs. 

Therefore, we present our Coronavirus Identity Management Survival Guide. We don’t know how long this crisis might persist, but we can help you fortify your digital perimeter in the meantime. 

Download Link to Privileged Access Management Buyer's Guide

The Coronavirus Identity Management Survival Guide

Authentication Takes Absolute Precedence 

Before the coronavirus struck, experts already recognized identity management as the true digital perimeter for businesses. Now, that hypothesis has become a truism. Next-generation identity management helps ensure that only allowed users to enter the network, more so than even antivirus. 

The core of any coronavirus identity management protocol must then focus on authentication. After all, authentication helps initially sort hackers from legitimate employees. However, password-only authentication offers little protection (if any) against external threat actors. Hackers can easily guess employees’ passwords based on social media information (information which grows in the era of social distancing). Otherwise, they can purchase a password cracking program from the Dark Web for next to nothing. 

The more factors between your sensitive data and the user requesting access, the more secure your enterprise. Therefore, you need to deploy multifactor authentication (MFA) across your entire enterprise. MFA can include both passive factors like geofencing and time of access request and active factors like biometrics. In fact, passive factors may prove easier to implement than ever before, since employees should generally stay where you expect them.

Moreover, you can integrate biometrics through users’ mobile devices with next-generation solutions. However, authentication at the initial login stage is still not enough. Your enterprise must also embrace continuous login to ensure that hackers can’t spoof the login portal and gain unobstructed access. Most next-generation identity management solutions provide behavioral analytics to help form baselines for continuous analytics.

Role Management and the Coronavirus

For coronavirus identity management, one key issue enterprises need to confront is access creep. With so many employees working remotely, assigning them temporary permissions becomes far easier. “Why would you go through the fuss of clogging your email with access requests when you can just lend users the powers they might need to sustain them through this crisis?” goes the logic. 

Unfortunately, this is the wrong way to go about this common problem. If you don’t maintain tight control and monitoring over your employee’s permissions, their accounts could bloat out of control; if this happens, they become prime targets for hackers to exploit. Moreover, they become more dangerous security vulnerabilities, as your system may not recognize malicious behavior immediately.

Instead of letting access creep infect your coronavirus identity management policies, use identity governance and administration (IGA). These solutions provide visibility and monitoring over users’ permissions; what’s more, it allows your IT security to revoke unnecessary privileges if necessary. Further, IGA allows organizations to automate temporary access requests and set time limits on how long accounts can hold temporary permissions.

Customer Safety in Coronavirus Identity Management

According to Marketing Week, 91 percent of brands predict an increase in their use of online services during the coronavirus outbreak. In fact, the coronavirus may have an effect similar to the SARS pandemic by pushing more people to embrace digital commerce. Therefore, customer identity and access management (CIAM) works to help enterprises solve the problems that come with increased demand. CIAM can enterprises scale their customer-facing networks and help secure storage of customer identity information for needed personalization. 

Additionally, CIAM streamlines and diversifies authentication, helping to simultaneously streamline shopping experiences and preventing abandoned carts. This includes social sign-on, a feature antithetical to traditional identity and access management but beloved by consumers. 

How to Learn More

Check out our Identity and Access Management Buyer’s Guide for more on the top providers and key capabilities. 


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