Access governance holds the security line

We must continue to hold the line, and we are, in this war on information security. We must continue to find our stride and take steps forward in regard to technology advancement especially as related to identity and access governance solutions.

Even as organizations continue to make great efforts and achieve success to gain control over security and access to their data, there’s no end in sight for the numerous to hacks and breach that will continue to strike most organizations. Unfortunately, the high-profile hacks and breaches of customer information will continue. Yet, we seldom hear any detail about internal access breaches (breaches because of internal organizational issues), until recently that is.

Let’s take a look at some recent research by the Ponemon Institute, which said that nearly 90 percent of all healthcare organizations have been breached over the past two years, and about half of those estimate they’ve been breach more than five times over that same period. While criminal attacks appear to be the primary reason for breaches in healthcare, “internal problems such as mistakes — unintentional employee actions, third-party snafus and stolen computing devices — account for the other half of data breaches.”

When an employee inadvertently has access to sensitive information and uses it for nefarious purposes, these internal breaches may not be detrimental in the near term, but could pose significant risk should the employee decide to leave or have an axe to grind with the organization.

Large, multi-national organizations often have the luxury of spending six to seven figure sums, can assign internal teams and hire consultants for six to 18 months to ensure that processes like role-based access control (RBAC), attestation and reconciliation were running smoothly and accurately. However, small to mid-size organizations have traditionally the cost and time to outweigh the benefits and have done the best they could to secure the internal network and data access with limited resources.

This is changing, especially for the smaller firms. The solutions are finally available for all organizations, and when implemented, provide added protection to the security of an organization’s data.

As we’ll continue to see, solution providers will see forward movement and provide great security strides while offering simpler, low-cost solutions in identity governance and administration. These solutions mean organizations that were previously excluded from considering these products will now be able to implement these solutions without the needs of hiring consultants or spending their entire IT budget for the year on them.

As with so many other technologies, what started out as only accessible to a few, will now be driven down market to become a reality for many. The real winner in this scenario are these small to mid-size companies — who need access to these solutions just as much as their bigger counterparts — that will now be able to implement best-of-class solutions to secure data, application and network access without the burden of world-class prices.

Moving ahead, we will likely continue to see great promise in security, data protection and access management despite the rise in breach and hack. In addition to new technology solutions, training and awareness training can help reduce the internal breach problems organizations of all sizes obviously face.

Tremendous promise continues on its way. If nothing else, we’ll continue to finally see more security and greater access to information for organizations in so far as reducing unauthorized access to data and applications and securing the same on a “need to know” basis since they’ll likely continue implementing identity and access governance solutions.