Strategies to Strengthen Identity and Access Management to Improve Data Privacy in 2023

Modern enterprises have a significant threat to their data, which makes it challenging for the SecOps teams to ensure data privacy to keep their sensitive information secure. The data privacy week 2023 should be a time to ponder over these. CISOs should strengthen their identity and access management policies to improve their data privacy.

Since early 2020, businesses have had to find new paths forward using different technologies and solutions to navigate the challenges of working through a global pandemic. While these changes might ultimately lead to strength and innovation in organizations around the world, they have also created new cyber-risks that can be exploited.

“Threat actors are continuing to exploit vulnerabilities across endpoints and cloud environments. They are innovating in the ways they use stolen credentials to bypass defenses to achieve their primary mission of stealing company data,” says Mike Sentonas, CTO, CrowdStrike.

According to a recent Research by CrowdStrike titled “2022 CROWDSTRIKE GLOBAL THREAT REPORT,” nearly 62% of attacks are not malware-based, and around 80% of cyberattacks will use identity-based exploitation to steal legitimate credentials and use techniques like lateral movement to evade detection and exfiltrate company data quickly.

Also Read: Four Key Privileged Access Management Issues CISOs Must Address

Following are a few strategies to strengthen their identity and access management to improve data privacy throughout the organization:

Keep the stakeholders in the loop.

Efficient identity and access management strategies need to consider all the security risks to improve overall data privacy. CISOs need to consider developing an IAM strategy that meets the organization’s data security demand and scales with it. Moreover, CISOs, CTOs, CDOs, and CIOs need to work cohesively to align the identity and access management policies with the organization’s goals across multiple disciplines and risk types. The SecOps teams should work directly with the clients while formulating an IAM strategy to enhance the customer experience. It is crucial for the data security teams to understand that IAM policies are not restricted to risk assessment and mitigation, threat modeling, and security policies definition and enforcement. Enterprises need to determine the stakeholder’s data privacy needs and develop a strategy accordingly to meet all the compliance needs.

Developing an identity protection strategy

A comprehensive identity protection solution will offer various benefits and enhance the organization’s capabilities. The option of a hybrid working environment is unlikely to disappear in the near future. But the increase in remote work has increased the potential attack surface for companies and possible vulnerabilities. Zero Trust and an identity protection strategy purposefully address the modern digital transformation problems of today, including securing remote workers, hybrid cloud environments, and ransomware threats. This is vital because according to a recent research report titled “2021 data breach investigations report“, 61% of breaches in the first half of 2021 involved credential data.

But it is also crucial to note that not all identity protection solutions are built equally. The most effective solutions should deliver a host of benefits and enhanced capabilities to the organization.

“The best identity protection technologies provide security for the most critical areas of enterprise risk to stop breaches in real-time for any endpoint and cloud workload, identity, and data, preventing modern attacks like ransomware or supply chain attacks,” Mike Sentonas, CTO, CrowdStrike.

Another benefit is hyper-accurate detections and automated protection, ensuring a frictionless Zero Trust journey for organizations of any size. This will also reduce the load on the business’ IT security team and enable more efficient remediation, providing the highest quality Zero Trust protection and performance without the overheads of managing data, threat feeds, hardware/software, and ongoing personnel costs, resulting in reduced security complexity and costs.

A comprehensive solution to the problem of identity

Identity security must comprise a comprehensive solution that protects all types of identities within the enterprise, human or machine, on-premises or hybrid, regular or privileged, all to detect and prevent identity-driven breaches, especially when adversaries manage to bypass endpoint security measures.

“Companies that upgrade their identity security approach will be best positioned to stop attacks in the future,” adds Mike.

Also Read: Identity and Access Management firm Okta Hires Symantec Exec as CSO 

Design and Enforce a Strong Password Policy

The success of the organization’s identity and access management depends on the password management and strategies implemented. If businesses rely on Single Sign-On (SSO) tools to ensure data privacy, then they need to ensure that all the users use a strong, unique, and difficult to guess to password to strengthen identity and access management. CISOs should consider enforcing a stringent password policy that makes the users change their passwords regularly and cannot be used for multiple sign-on requirements. Moreover, it is crucial to set up a regular password audit schedule to review user passwords and make necessary changes to strengthen the users’ passwords.