People come, and people go, and while digital identities should cease to exist after a departure, many times, this doesn’t happen. At any given time, organizations can have thousands of user identities to manage and track, so when processes aren’t automated, it’s easy for many identities to fall through the cracks. This phenomenon is called Identity Lifecycle Management, and when it comes to access and security, it’s worth the time to get it right.
StrongDM manages and audits access to infrastructure.
- Role-based, attribute-based, & just-in-time access to infrastructure
- Connect any person or service to any infrastructure, anywhere
- Logging like you've never seen
Access Management: Are Those Workflows or Workarounds?
If you hope to embrace Modern Security this year, you’re not alone. As companies grow, innovate, and embrace new technologies, more employees need access to more critical systems. But with great access comes great responsibility.
Existing workflows and processes that involve old-school methods don’t scale and are non-compliant. Access requests can take hours, days, or even weeks to fulfill. In our recent survey, 53% of organizations said they require hours to weeks just to get access to critical systems. It’s no wonder teams may try to ease friction by sharing logins and over-provisioning users, but these workarounds make organizations less secure and turn compliance documentation into a nightmare.
Access is foundational to not only enabling technical teams to do their jobs, but also to embracing modern security practices, such as Zero Trust. And when done well, it can improve your security posture while also delivering better efficiencies for your development and technical teams.
Zero Trust Is Aspirational, Access Is Addressable
In fact, in a recent podcast, Gartner analyst John Watts named access and identity as the critical starting points for adopting Zero Trust. Access to infrastructure has snowballed out of control, so it’s no surprise that as Zero Trust has gained steam, 80% of organizations are including access management as a critical initiative over the next 12 months.
One of the biggest issues is this challenge is additive. Access to every new technology or system must be managed in addition to all existing systems and technical debt. Traditional access control methods are unsustainable, and infrastructure access will only get more complex as organizations continue to embrace new technologies and the cloud, and as teams grow.
How do we know? In our survey, only 32% of teams listed Kubernetes as one of the most difficult technologies to manage in terms of access. This number is likely to increase as more organizations adopt this new and upcoming technology. In other words, the challenges inherent in managing access to ephemeral infrastructure have not been fully realized yet.
Access Management Is a Critical Initiative
Like DevOps, Zero Trust isn’t something you buy—it’s a methodology that you embrace. Access Management is an essential starting point for teams hoping to adopt modern security practices, such as Zero Trust, in 2022. When done well, it can improve your compliance posture, reduce overhead, and get your people connected to the systems they need when they need them.
Check out the full report, 2022: The Year of Access. Or if your organization is ready to embrace modern security, schedule a free demo of StrongDM to see how our infrastructure access platform can start you on the road to Zero Trust today.
About the Author
💙 this post?
Then get all that StrongDM goodness, right in your inbox.
You May Also Like
We are thrilled to announce a new feature to our StrongDM® Dynamic Access Management (DAM) platform: Device Trust. This feature amplifies your organization's security posture by employing device posture data from endpoint security leaders CrowdStrike or SentinelOne.
The New York Department of Financial Services (“NYDFS”) Cybersecurity Regulation is a set of comprehensive cybersecurity requirements that apply to financial institutions operating in New York. The goal of the regulation is to ensure that the cybersecurity programs of financial institutions have robust safeguards in place to protect customer data and the financial sector.
The AWS Well-Architected Framework has been a staple for many years for AWS practitioners of all sorts, including cloud architects and platform engineers. It’s a blueprint for architectural and design best practices that will lay the foundation for resilience, operational efficiency, and security on the AWS Cloud.
If credentials fall into the wrong hands, intruders may enter a network and launch a disastrous attack. In fact, 46% of cybersecurity incidents involve authentication credentials, according to the Verizon 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report. Organizations have two general ways to determine someone’s access rights once past initial authentication: Coarse-grained access control (CGAC), which relies on a single factor, and fine-grained access control (FGAC), which relies on multiple factors. Traditionally, CGAC has been the easier option, while FGAC offers superior security at the cost of more complex implementation.