Utilizing a Cloud-Based IAM Solution in Government
The proper security of your systems and resources is crucial, especially when you’re handling government or private citizens’ personally identifiable information (PII) and data. Data leaks are lurking and can have far-reaching implications that risk sensitive personal data, such as social security numbers or care and social services information.
While stolen devices and users clicking on suspicious links do occur, the majority of data leaks are surprisingly not caused by cyber criminals (hackers), but by a mistake or manual error from one of your employees. An example of such a mistake could be: a lost USB stick with sensitive personal data or negligence within the security of your systems.
Questions commonly asked among Government helpdesk employees:
- Who has access to which systems?
- How do I ensure that ex-employees can no longer access the systems?
- How do I keep track of who I have given access to (and in which environment)?
- How do I increase user-friendliness?
These are just a few typical issues to which an Identity Access Management solution can provide an answer.
Automated Provisioning
There are a lot of responsibilities associated with manually provisioning resources and data while working in government. Managing active and inactive user accounts, ensuring appropriate access rights for employees, monitoring resource usage, and more come with even greater stakes due to the PII involved. Removing any potential room for inadvertent error or active malfeasance remains as critical as ever.
With an automated provisioning solution, you can eliminate the delays, errors, and inconsistencies associated with manually provisioning resources. By driving automated provisioning off of HR system data, you can ensure new employees receive all their resources on Day 1, existing users’ access is kept up-to-date, and departing users have accounts rapidly deactivated. Further, your IT department now has more time to focus on more impactful projects.
Beyond improved process execution, access is carefully monitored and recorded with a centralized IAM solution. Reports provide insight into who has accessed which applications, at what time, and the from where (e.g., IP address, location). Through automated provisioning’s logs, you can identify and prevent a user from continuing to hold unnecessary rights or licenses and truly begin securing access to your resources.
Quick and Secure Access
Securing your resources and information is a necessity. That said, navigating dozens of login combinations, multiple tokens with pin codes, authenticator apps and more can seriously sacrifice seamless access in favor of security. While protecting your data and resources should be of the highest importance, prohibitively complex security measures also cause inefficiencies.
Luckily, there are many options your organization can take to circumvent this issue. One such option is using single sign-on (SSO) in conjunction with multifactor authentication (MFA). Single sign-on allows your employees to access all of their resources and applications by only providing their credentials once. This removes the countless variations of passwords for each individual application, dramatically speeding login processes.
By pairing SSO with MFA, users are required to complete an additional verification step to access systems and resources. SSO combined with MFA makes the initial login one (simple) step longer, yet eliminates all other authentication requirements. Overall, this strongly boosts employee efficiency. Employees just need to provide their credentials and the extra piece of verification (e.g., SMS code, email, push notification, etc.) and they can gain access to all of their resources without addition logins.
HelloID – Identity Management in the cloud
HelloID from Tools4ever provides a complete, cloud-based Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) solution. You don’t need to invest in your own identity management infrastructure, hardware, storage, security, or software, and you won’t have to tackle updates or fixes yourself.
Our solution runs on highly-secured servers. HelloID includes three major modules: Access Management, Service Automation, and Provisioning. Thanks to HelloID, you no longer have to worry about potential audits or compliance concerns, and can still benefit from the efficiency of an SSO solution that makes your applications accessible.
To learn more about HelloID, or to set up a time for your own personal demo, contact one of our North American office locations.