A secure environment in the workplace requires careful control over access rights to user accounts and applications. IAM solutions help ensure that only authorized users can access sensitive information and systems.
A comprehensive solution can integrate with widely-used authorization-related business systems such as Active Directory, Group Policy, SharePoint, and Exchange to provide insights on who has access to what. It also tracks changes to privileged accounts and provides insight into potential insider threats.
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Increased Security
These access management solutions provide increased security for organizations in various ways. These include improved visibility and granular controls around privileged accounts, one of the biggest sources of data breaches.
Threat actors can exploit privileged accounts to gain control of systems and sensitive data or sabotage the organization. Privileged access management (PAM) solutions are essential to protect businesses’ privileged accounts on-premises and in the cloud.
Forrester Research has found that 80% of breaches result from compromised user credentials.
Aside from preventing credential theft, many access management solutions also offer real-time email and text notifications that alert administrators to potential policy violations and suspicious activity by privileged users.
In addition, many IAM solutions have password management capabilities that help security admins enforce password best practices and stronger authentication measures. They can also ensure that only authorized users can access resources and remove the possibility of reusing passwords across multiple accounts. These features reduce the risk of data breaches and help companies meet compliance requirements.
Better Compliance
Compliance issues are an increasingly important part of the business, whether related to labor laws, environmental protection, or price fixing. They can majorly impact companies’ reputations and brand image internally and externally.
To avoid this, organizations need to develop a strong culture of compliance that reflects their values. This starts with ensuring that everyone in the organization understands what is expected of them and how to conduct themselves accordingly.
The right compliance culture can make enforcing compliance policies and processes easier in the office and beyond the workplace. To get this right, senior leaders should create the tone that guides compliance behavior – communicating messaging and training and modeling it as they do their job.
Increased Productivity
An effective productivity strategy is a big part of any organization’s success. Increased productivity can help a company make more money, allowing it to invest profit back into the business.
It can also improve employee satisfaction, as employees feel better about their job and the company. And increased productivity often leads to improved work-life balance for employees – a must for the health of the workplace.
To get the most out of your access management solution, you need to find a way to give users control over what they can and cannot do with their data, applications, and systems. This includes setting up granular permissions that allow or block users based on time, place, and device.
The best identity and access management solutions help you do this. They can also save you money in the long run. For instance, a smart identity and access management system that automates a range of critical authentication methods can save you the time and effort it would take to implement these measures manually.
Reduced Costs
Access Management (AM) solutions help organizations lower operational costs by reducing IT resources to administer user accounts and manage access privileges. These costs include labor for support desk staff, time spent on manual processes, and security costs for updating and maintaining accounts.
Identity and access management also help reduce help desk call volume for users who need password resets, which can be a significant expense. These calls can be handled by a simple, automated process, freeing up help desk staff to focus on more complex problems.
In addition, a good access management solution enables you to control user permissions and provide granular authorizations that match a user’s job functions. This ensures that only the tools, software, and hardware a user needs are given to them to be productive.
These solutions also allow you to control access to data and applications, which is important for compliance purposes. They help you prove that your users have the correct access to corporate information and protect data against fraud, theft, and other risks. They also enable you to monitor user activity and generate reports that help you identify and mitigate risks.
Enhanced Customer Service
Access management solutions help to streamline processes in the workplace. They allow businesses to automate provisioning and de-provisioning processes for employees, partners, contractors, vendors, and guests. They also give IT full control over user accounts, reducing human error likelihood. Furthermore, they provide automated audit trails and allow IT teams to easily revoke access when employees leave the company or their roles change.
These benefits can be particularly important for organizations with customer service teams that must resolve support issues quickly and efficiently. They can also improve the quality of customer services by creating a self-service portal where customers can easily solve their problems themselves, saving your team the effort of having to contact them. This can save time and money on customer contact, an essential part of the customer experience. In addition, it can improve overall customer satisfaction.