The Importance of Identity Risk Management

More than ever, your workforce depends on digital tools. New technology helps to streamline processes, boost efficiency, and increase customer satisfaction, but relying on digital systems can also create major risks. If security is compromised, the reputational, financial, and regulatory consequences could be severe.

Passwords remain by far the most common way to protect systems from attacks. But when it comes to managing identity risks, passwords are simply not enough. Nearly half of employees admit to using passwords across multiple systems. Thus, if passwords are your first and only line of defense against cyber threats, it may only be a matter of time before you suffer a breach.

In this article, we’ll consider some of the greatest identity and access management (IAM) risk factors, present best practices for determining your exposure, and show you how you can act now to strengthen your security posture.

Employees sharing passwords or choosing weak passwords are leading causes of data breaches, but these aren’t the only ways for attackers to compromise your systems. A mature IAM capability that is context aware mitigates these risks by introducing one or more additional forms of authentication, prompting the user to complete these authentication steps when risk thresholds are met. These authentication methods include one-time passes shared via mobile devices, biometrics such as fingerprint scanners, and physical hardware tokens.

Businesses can also significantly reduce the risk of a breach by regularly monitoring user accounts and ensuring that inactive users are deprovisioned in a timely manner. This is particularly important for users with privileged accounts, which may allow them to perform functions such as installing or uninstalling software or modifying application configurations without administrator permission. If attackers gain access to a privileged account, they may be able to move laterally through your network without detection, further escalate their privileges, and gain access to even more sensitive data.

To guard against these and other types of attacks, it is also crucial to patch and harden your software—particularly if those systems are exposed to external networks. End-of-life applications and operating systems are more likely to have vulnerabilities that are actively exploited by attackers, so establishing a vulnerability management and remediation program is a powerful way to disarm the threat. An effective identity risk management strategy should also include a way to alert information security teams to new data breaches–for example, allowing you to determine the possible impacts of password dumps on your organization.

With these risk factors in mind, the next step is to carry out a thorough identity risk management assessment. The structure of this process varies from business to business, but most assessments follow the same essential format.

The first part of the process typically involves a discovery exercise: building an overview of all physical and information systems that support mission-critical processes or hold sensitive information. At this stage, businesses should also map out roles and user groups throughout the organization, identify dependencies, and determine appropriate policies for all types of user accounts. The assessment should also include a workflow for deprovisioning inactive or unnecessary accounts, helping to minimize the attack surface. Companies such as SailPoint can help facilitate identity governance.

Building on these insights, businesses should engage with stakeholders throughout the organization to help identify all business risks associated with their digital systems, assess the possible consequences of a cyberattack, and define safeguards to keep risk as low as reasonably practicable without reducing employee productivity.

If identity risk management seems like an intimidating task, the good news is that there are a few easy steps you can take right now. Many digital platforms, such as PingOne for Workforce, offer two-factor authentication capabilities, which you can activate immediately to offer greater protection against a password breach. 

In the longer term, however, you really need to consider moving away from passwords altogether and toward an identity-centric, zero-trust, passwordless approach to IAM. Ping offers comprehensive services and solutions for identity risk management, empowering you to leave the Wild West of password management behind, enabling better authentication decisions, and reducing business risk.