Data is protected through Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions, which provide each person or non-human entity who accessbes the company’s network a digital identity. The access privileges are then set such that each user has a minimum amount of access necessary to perform their task.
Authentication can be done with multi-factor authentication or adaptive authentication. Authorization can be done using policies that evaluate a range of attributes.
Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
Data threats are a growing concern for businesses. They can be caused by external adversaries—nation states, cyber criminals, and disgruntled employees—or well-meaning yet negligent insiders.
Companies like Tools4Ever offer IAM solutions with DLP capabilities that can monitor sensitive information in transit or at rest and stop it from being lost or exfiltrated. DLP scans for and detects confidential information like intellectual property or PII, then blocks it from leaving your network, emailing to untrusted contacts, or being copied onto USB drives.
DLP also provides visibility into how and where your company’s sensitive data moves, revealing transmission paths and repositories. A successful DLP program starts small and focuses on specific use cases to minimize the impact on core business activities. Eventually, you can scale the program to include all your organizational data.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
Many people have a ton of passwords for all the different resources they use, from work applications to social media and email. Password best practices encourage users to create complex and unique passwords. Unfortunately, cybercriminals can still access these accounts by brute-forcing the passwords.
By requiring more than just a username and password to access a secure system, MFA is intended to stop this. Biometrics like fingerprints, voice, thumbprint, facial recognition, and hardware tokens are among these security considerations.
MFA can be set up to look like single sign-on (SSO) authentication, which is popular among users of web and cloud-based apps. Even while working remotely, this offers ease and guarantees that the user is who they say they are.
Adaptive Authentication
Adaptive authentication adjusts security policies to reflect the way people work today. Rather than locking down devices and users, adaptive security provides the right balance of security and convenience. It supports remote working and easy bring-your-own-device (BYOD) with dynamic, real-time policy creation, enabling secure and seamless logins without disrupting user productivity.
Instead of simply requiring a correct username and password, adaptive security considers the user’s location, device ID, payment details, and more to determine how likely an access attempt is to be fraudulent. This allows legitimate workers and customers to access data and systems with less friction while tightening security for those at higher risk of a breach. This helps prevent phishing scams that steal and sell credentials on the dark web.
Privileged Access Management (PAM)
Privileged access management (PAM) controls secret accounts to reduce the attack surface for hackers. It leverages tools and technology to manage and secure privileged access for hardware devices, software applications, web services, and other platforms. It aims to balance security with ease of use for IT admins by providing highly secure tools and easy-to-manage and implement PAM policies across all systems.
PAM solutions should be able to revoke credentials from a central location and provide just-in-time access so that users can only maintain elevated privileges for the time required to complete a task, reducing their exposure. This can help prevent malware attacks that exploit privileged accounts to spread or gain additional access to your system. It can also prevent unauthorized users from accessing sensitive data or systems and identify malicious activities that other security measures might have missed.
Single Sign-On (SSO)
A cutting-edge authentication technology, single sign-on allows users to log in with unique credentials to multiple systems and touchpoints. Once verified, the single sign-on service remembers that you’re verified, so any subsequent services you try to access will automatically pass your authentication token – and only if they have permission.
SSO helps your business save time and money by reducing help desk calls related to password resets. And since users only have to log in once, they’re less likely to develop password fatigue and are more likely to create solid and hard-to-guess passwords that don’t risk being written down and exposed to hackers.
SSO also makes adhering to industry requirements, which demand stringent security measures due to its centralized user management. It also makes it simpler to de-provision users if they leave your business or no longer require access to systems and lowers the number of passwords in use.