How AI platform can help Identity Governance and Access Control?

Companies build many security measures to protect systems, but the key part of protecting data is to create proper identity access management and access control measures.

Identity access management products manage access provision and de-provision for systems and application. However, these products must ensure access is provided to the right people and the right applications. The identity access management framework is to ensure the access provision and de-provision is defined with approval workflow. Also, need to track who has approved and provided access for audit and security compliance. Access control ensures tracking of access request approval and access right reviews to ensure identity governance and audits for compliance.

User Access and Entitlement Reviews are done to ensure the user entitlements are up to date and no orphaned users or no excessive privileged users are present. The main challenge with User access and entitlement reviews process is to ensure continuous review of user access rights and entitlements. The access reviews are very complicated, manual and tedious work to identify users, entitlements, and managers to review on a continuous basis.

You need to ask a few questions. Can we create an automated solution for Identity Governance using advanced AI platforms? Can we reduce the security risk by continuously monitoring the access rights and privileges in real time?

AI platforms can be used to determine and assign appropriate access privileges to employees and contractors based on the attributes of user behavior, access level, environment, and data. The platform can be matured over time, based on the attributes and data.

Read More:

https://www.useraccessreview.com/how-ai-platform-can-help-identity-governance-and-access-control/

Ready to see the demo? Please click the link:

https://securends.com/request-a-demo

How to automate User Access Reviews?

User Access Review:

Compliance management has become an integral part of any organization’s business. Combined with a growing sense of cyber-(in) security, companies need to constantly monitor risks, correct issues and demonstrate control.

User Access Review (UAR) is the only way to ensure traceability and accountability of user entitlement across infrastructure, data and application resources. With Brainwave GRC, define and implement a review strategy that combines efficiency and productivity.

SecurEnds provides cutting-edge solution to automate User Access Reviews with a great UI and quick setup to add value to the information security and compliance teams.

1. Easy to configure connectors to connect to standard applications and custom connectors to custom applications to extract users and entitlement data.
2. If connectors are not needed, upload a CSV file with users and entitlement data to perform reviews.
3. Match all application users to HR/System of Record.
4. Schedule periodic and onetime access review campaigns for applications.
5. Managers/Reviewers to perform access reviews at a secured portal.
6. Complete access certification and generate audit reports for access attestation.
7. Show that has access to what across your enterprise.
8. Rapid implementation using SecurEnds SaaS offering.

For More Information, Please go through the website:

https://www.useraccessreview.com/how-to-automate-user-access-reviews/

Ready to see the demo? Please click the link:

https://securends.com/request-a-demo

Why User Access Governance Projects Fail? - SecurEnds

Companies are taking an “identity centric” view of IT controls and making investments to secure data and achieve compliance. However, not all investments are successful. Over the last few months, I have spoken with multiple industry leaders at conferences, interacted with prospects during demos and worked closely with customers during implementations. Every so often I get to hear about failures security leaders had with implementing governance projects in their career. While the list of reasons for a particular project failure can vary, I do see a recurring theme across most botched implementations.

Complexity & Cost:

Today’s human or service identity sprawls across cloud, bring-your-own-devices (BYOD), BOT etc. User identities exist in different forms within different systems and the governance solution has to synchronize these and provide a single identity for each business user. For example, procurement may have an expenses system that uses email address and password, and marketing may use active directory login credentials to authenticate users into their system. With these complex technological environments legacy off-the-shelf solutions need extensive customization to accommodate today’s identity use cases. Projects are sold on implementation prowess of the consulting team and grand vision.

Lack of Adoption:

The success of any product relies on its unanimous adoption by end users, and identity solutions are no exception. The solution should make life easier for the users, not harder. Many product companies mistakenly believe product features and customer needs are the same. I don’t remember the last time I used many preset cycles on my washing machine? Identity products are not any different. Users hate cluttered interfaces and features which dazzle but rarely add any value. Many vendors in their haste to improve upon the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) extend the basic functions, and end up with a product that does many things. The essential function gets lost. Unfortunately, this extensive functionality challenges end users to memorize all the capabilities and features the platform provides. Inertia sets in, and the adoption stops. There is no dearth of examples where governance solution “went live” but was inevitably scrapped for the previous status quo, usually an Excel and SharePoint solution.

Read More: https://medium.com/@SecurEnds/why-governance-projects-fail-97563bc4f9c5

CISO Jane was struggling with painful manual access review – SecurEnds

CISO Jane was struggling with painful manual access reviews and lengthy remediation times. Sounds familiar? 

SecurEnds provides a cloud-native access governance platform with breakthrough simplicity, speed, and savings. Read more

Automate User Access and Entitlement Reviews:

1. Enable companies to continuously run review campaigns of the user access rights and roles, by assigning the manager to certify, revoke their entitlements. As a result of this there is an increase in positive and accuracy of certifications and making the certification process auditable and compliant.
2. Compliance and auditing reporting features deliver identity intelligence and answers the common questions like ‘who has access to this program, and ‘who approved that access?
3. Addresses Governance and Compliance challenges like Attestation/Certification, Validation and Reporting in one solution.
4. Enables large enterprises to get in control of users’ entitlements across a vast range of systems, while simultaneously enabling them to be in control of their own future.
5. Available on-premise, in the cloud, or as a managed service with built-in connectors for a variety of systems.

Read More:

https://securends.com/user-access-entitlement-reviews/

Request for demo:

https://www.securends.com/

Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) User Access Reviews for Publicly Traded Companies

SecurEnds product directly supports SOX requirements for USER ACCESS REVIEWS and compliance auditing. By streamlining the management of user identities and access rights, automating enforcement of SOD policies, and automating time-consuming audits and reports, our product can help support strong security policies across your enterprise, while reducing the overall cost of compliance.

Recently, a Fortune 500 company over 35000 employees and 2400 managers achieved its Entitlement review for SOX audits target in 60 days using our product.

SOX User Access Review Controls

Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) states: “Registered accounting firm shall, in the same report, attest to and report on the assessment on the effectiveness of the internal control structure and procedures for financial reporting” (Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, 2002).

By requiring accounting firms to assess and report on a public company’s internal control for financial reporting, it affirms the integrity of the financial reports. Since financial data stored in the company’s IT systems, by ensuring the security of these IT systems, companies can attest to the integrity of their financial reports.

Information Technology can enable Identity Governance and Access Certification to meet SOX compliance. Identity Governance and methods provide direct support for the SOX requirements for compliance auditing.

Let us help you achieve your SOX compliance goals. Set up a demo and see how our product is used in 9 different industries across 5 countries for achieving regulatory and compliance goals.

Solution: SecurEnds Credential Entitlement Management

• Automates user access and entitlement reviews.
• Match accounts across applications to create an Identity database.
• Identify and connect to disconnected applications including CSV file upload and map entitlements for user access reviews.
• Establish ownership for mapping users, custom entitlement for custom and disconnected applications.
• Set up continuous access review campaigns, notifications, escalations, and real-time status on the access certification.
• Simplify Audit and Compliance reporting needed during the annual access review

Read More:

https://www.useraccessreview.com/sox-user-access-reviews-for-publicly-traded-companies/

Request for Demo:

https://securends.com/request-a-demo/

Manual Access Recertification: An Audit Nightmare

The importance of access recertification was established with Sarbanes- Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX). Section 404 states: “Registered accounting firm shall, in the same report, attest to and report on the assessment on the effectiveness of the internal control structure and procedures for financial reporting”. Simply put, companies are required to maintain the integrity of reports by ensuring right resources have access to the right systems that generate these reports. Manual access recertification seemed like a great way to maintain compliance when the law was enacted. Unfortunately, with proliferation of IT assets and growing sophistication of hackers, manual access recertification is an anti-pattern for security and compliance:

1. Audit Nightmare: Without exception we keep hearing about organizations that have their internal audit teams do assessment of access over spreadsheets spanning hundreds of tabs and then undertaking back and forth emails among stakeholders to capture audit evidence. It is no surprise that many of these organizations have audit findings.

2. Productivity Drain: Manual process is tedious execution of repetitive tasks that are non value add to the company and employee morale. A typical quarterly acmes recertification for a 1000 plus employee company requires many paid hours to collect and transform information from applications, databases and files under review. The process generates endless volumes of data found in excel sheets or unstructured formats such as emails. The same process is repeated every so often. It is not uncommon to see some anti patterns such as reviewers taking to rubber stamping.

3. High Error Rate: Today companies have multiple systems, databases and applications (enterprise, custom and cloud). Authentication methods typically vary between connected and disconnected applications. Therefore, employee, contractors and vendors have multiple account IDs across today’s IT eco-system. Without a unique identifier or identity source between these accounts it is nearly impossible to attribute these to corresponding employee, vendor or contractor identity information. Reviews just can’t make out with 100% accuracy the abbreviated IDs, roles and access rights coming out of the systems. We keep hearing about many manual recertification yielding audit findings.

4. Challenging to Enforce Segregation of Duty (SOD): An Excel based recertification of users and privileges can after very tedious effort yield information on SOD conflicts. However, this manual process cannot be used to proactively enforce SOD with new-onboarding and employee changes. Every time a employee’s job duties change owing to promotion or moving to a different department, the data needs to be manually updated to check for any SOD conflicts.

5. Lack of Centralized Visibility: Depending on the company’s risk appetite and internal IT controls, access recertification may be needed on quarterly or semiannual basis. However, managers who need to review and approve user access often don’t take serious ownership owing to their day job. Sieving though the inbox for access review document is not ideal for anyone. This lack of centralized visibility and review communication that ensures all parties involved understand the significance of access recertification and the importance of timely closure is missing with a manual process.

6. Non Integrated De-provisioning: Completing the review process is just one aspect of the user recertification. Getting to that end game in a timely fashion is nearly impossible if upon completion of the reviews there is not tie up with the task to remove user access.

Manual Access recertification’s is not only daunting, inefficient but also a big anti pattern to achieve continuous SOX, IS0 27001, HIPAA, GLBA etc compliance. In our survey of 13 CISO’s across Financial Services, Credit Unions, Healthcare and Manufacturing industries automation of access recertification’s ranked among the top three priorities. SecurEnds is leading the market with its lightweight, highly configurable and industry first flex-connector product that keeps companies secure while meeting audit and compliance requirements.

Our software allows you to load user data from multiple system of record, connect dynamically to applications, match identities with user credentials, manage heartbeat identities across connected and disconnected, schedule one-time or periodic access recertification and create proof of compliance for external auditors. In only 30 minutes we can demo why our SAAS software is now a leading choice for identity governance.

Read More:

https://www.useraccessreview.com/manual-access-recertification-an-audit-nightmare/

Request for demo:

https://www.securends.com/request-a-demo/

Employee Termination - IT Compliance and Audit Solution

During the COVID-19 breakout many employees transitioned to work from home schedules. Many employees and contractors will carry on working from home even after the pandemic subsides. In this rapidly changing work dynamics, organizations of all sizes should examine their employee termination process. As soon as the decision to terminate an employee has been made, IT admin should receive a near real-time notification. IT admins are typically responsible for securing data, managing access to resources and maintaining permissions and access rights policies across the assets.

In our research we found that organizations with employees between 250 - 1500 display varying degree of automated provisioning and de-provisioning. Unsurprisingly, a large percentage of companies and non-profit organizations have manual de-provisioning where the onus of timely withdrawing employee access across systems and databases is spread across the reporting manager, HR, IT administration.

Based on our experience configuring our SaaS product to help SMB companies manage employee termination, we recommend the following:

• Use software that automates termination workflow between HR system and downstream systems. Many of our customers use SecurEnds easy integration with service management systems such as Jira, ServiceNow to open de-provisioning tickets. Others prefer to use our Active Directory connector to de-provision employees.

• Refer back to the latest user access reviews to know what system the terminated employee had access to. Unless your organization has done periodic evaluation of employee entitlements, there is no way to know with 100% surety what access the employees enjoyed beyond just what his role allows.

SecurEnds recently hosted a tailored demo for a banking prospect. Their main use case was employee provisioning and de-provisioning. They were looking for an easy-to-use solution that empowers business managers to make entitlement decisions for their employees and drive the de-provisioning. Currently, the IT team manually provisions and de-provisions employees. Although provisioning was inefficient leading to access delays for the new hire, de-provisioning was the biggest concern as IT was not always notified in a timely fashion when HR terminated the employee. As it turned out, this prospect needed a workflow that tied JML events to their JIRA ticketing system while logging the changes for audit trail. Simple. We agreed that a real time connector was a future thing.

SecurEnds is helping a number of Credit Unions and Community Bank achieve IT controls and compliance. Our lightweight, highly configurable and industry first flex-connector product can be early deployed on your on-prem. Our product an easily bolt on to your existing single -sign-on solution to make a comprehensive end to end identity management solutions. In only 30 minutes we can demo “why our SAAS software is now a leading choice for identity governance”.

Read More:

https://medium.com/@SecurEnds/insufficient-employee-termination-workflow-leads-to-audit-finding-and-potential-breaches-2582ad8ff320

Reference Links:

https://www.securends.com/automate-homegrown-legacy-identity-solution/

https://www.securends.com/workday-integration-for-automated-provisioning-and-de-provisioning/

Employee Onboarding & Offboarding is a big hassle. SecurEnds can automate the process for you.

SecurEnds’ pre-built integration with HRIS system unifies HR and IT, using employee data and updates in HRIS to inform the user lifecycle across IT systems, including Active Directory, cloud apps, and on-premises systems.

With this integration, you can fulfill:

1. Provision and De-provision user access in Enterprise apps, Cloud apps, Microsoft apps, and Enterprise databases.

2. Automate Approval Workflows Manage Roles, Permissions and Groups

3. Stay compliant with Security Audit and Reporting

4. Scale with your organization

5. Reduce the cost with automation and minimize errors with a manual process

SecurEnds IAM product enables Identity Access and Lifecycle Management for employee onboarding and offboarding with Provisioning and De-Provisioning of user access in Active Directory, Azure, O365, Microsoft Dynamics, AWS, and Google apps, SAP, Salesforce and Databases. It manages user access permissions for employees, partners, customers and access approval management.

Read More:

https://www.securends.com/employee-onboarding-offboarding-is-a-big-hassle-securends-can-automate-the-process-for-you/

https://www.securends.com/cloud-identity-access-management/