Access Management is a key part of maintaining confidentiality in a business. Access management is simply about limiting access to important company resources to those that need that access for a business reason. This is commonly referred to as the principle of least privilege and it’s a very important aspect of cybersecurity. In this article, we are going to discuss two important elements of access management, identity access management, and privilege access management.
Identity Access Management (IAM)
IAM is the combination of policies, processes, and technologies that ensure that the right users have access to the appropriate technology resources. Now there are three main aspects of IAM that you should be aware of: Authentication, Authorization, and Accountability.
Authentication: This is the process of a user proving that they are who they claim to be. For example, if you want to log in to your Gmail account you need to provide the email address and the password, this combination is only supposed to be known by you and therefore acts as proof that you are the owner of the account. All Identity Access Management processes begin this authentication.
Authorization: Once the user has been authenticated the next step is to determine his level of authorization. Authorization is the process of determining what level of access rights/privileges this user should have on the system. An example of this is if you compare what an admin-level account can do compared to what a guest account can do. The process by which this is determined is authorization, usually, this takes into account what the job role of the user is and what they will need to be able to do to get their job done.
Accountability: This is your ability to hold people accountable for the actions they take on your system. Noone should be able to perform an action on your environment and then be able to deny that they performed that action, this is called non-repudiation. This is usually done by keeping logs and monitoring the actions that are performed by each user account.
Privileged Access Management
This is a subset of access management that focuses on privileged accounts. Privileged usually means any account that provides access or privileges beyond normal user accounts, a common example would be an admin or service account. Since these accounts have more access, they are considered higher risk than regular accounts and require more security controls. Some common best practices for privileged accounts are:
- Enforcing separation of duties and privileges
- Enforcing strong password guidelines
- Monitoring and auditing all privileged activity
- Identifying and managing all privileged accounts and credentials
- Creating a privileged management policy
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