The challenges and solutions of compliance in the modern work environment

In today’s world of open access, data is shared by users across the extended enterprise on-premise and in the cloud, which begs the question: “how do organisations take control of who has access to what data and how is this data being used?” in order to avoid policy and regulatory non-compliance in the modern work environment.
The growing acceptance of BYOD and work mobility have forced organisations to open their networks to remote workers, customers and other stakeholders looking to access sensitive and proprietary information from any location and at any time. As essential as these technologies have become for doing b usiness, they also expose businesses to a new set of security threats. With the growth in data and the means by which users can access it, comes increasing regulatory pressure to demonstrate that organisations comply with the requirements to guarantee security, meet compliance, and assure customers and regulators that sensitive information is being protected from misuse and compromise. It is critically important that governments and private and public corporations are able to certify that access control and access to information are regularly monitored, enforced, and tracked for all entities accessing the system, to ensure they remain compliant and secure.
As the workforce becomes increasingly decentralised, with branch offices, home offices, and remote employees, the need for access management and control is greater than ever. The challenge of complying with IT governance and safeguarding sensitive information becomes significantly more complex. The issues have gone beyond ‘who has access to what’ to include who is seeing what data and information, what is being done with this information, and why do they have access in the first place. A growing number of organisations are leveraging temporary staff and contractors to fill voids in staffing, including executives, IT managers, and general workers. This creates huge challenges for policy management and risk mitigation to ensure that temporary staff or contractors don’t have access to sensitive information that is not pertinent to their role or responsibility. Moreover, these workers often have a casual understanding of the firm’s security policies. When employees leave or move between different user groups and require access to diverse information, the challenge for organisations to control access provisions increases.
Technology plays a significant role in protecting organisations against the challenges of access risk. New security processes are required to ensure that organisations do not lose control over sensitive, private information. Compliance with security policy and industry regulations must be enforced by managing and monitoring processes to identify high risk areas and vulnerabilities. Businesses must adopt intelligence-led approaches to understanding and taking action on access risk, ensuring threats are properly targeted and neutralised. Firstly, organisations must address the challenge that compliance policies are often misunderstood or ignored, although not necessarily on purpose. Therefore, instead of relying solely on manual compliance, modern organisations must turn to automated mechanisms to allow real-time monitoring of access risk and user provisions.
Identity and Access Management (IAM) software that is equipped with access intelligence capabilities delivers agile, scalable solutions that allow organisations to analyse and identify patterns of access or behaviour that violate company policy and industry regulations. Recent figures and reports emphasise that organisations need automated controls to manage user access throughout the employee lifecycle in order to protect against accumulated access, orphan accounts, policy violations and other potential security threats. There is growing need for centralised identity management that will allow:
£ Customers to meet evolving compliance regulations
£ Automation to replace manual IAM processes
£ Increased security
£ Analysis and reporting of customer/user access and actions.

No single technology will solve the wide range of risks posed while protecting sensitive information. This is demonstrated by the fact that IAM is increasingly used in conjunction with Security Incident and Event Management (SIEM) and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) software to provide a comprehensive, synchronised and holistic approach to enterprise security and compliance. Sophisticated enterprises integrate IAM, SIEM and DLP solutions in order to leverage data and information from all of these systems. What’s more, one of the greatest and most time-consuming challenges facing organisations comes with the logging, reporting, and auditing required to comply with audit requirements. Implementing an IAM infrastructure is not a do-it-and-forget-about-it process for IT and organisations; it involves an ongoing relationship with application owners and lines of business managers so that everyone has a universal understanding of the security risk and potential vulnerabilities caused by lack of enforcement and non-compliance with access policies.
Given how pivotal identity and access management systems are to security, compliance and operations, it is important that strategies are reviewed and opportunities are embraced to ensure that business security remains aligned with access risk. The use of access intelligence can help organisations identify potential threats in real-time in order to prevent breaches before they occur. Businesses need comprehensive, effective mechanisms in place to remain secure and compliant by automatically terminating or changing access rights in accordance with internal security policies and industry regulations.
Real-time access intelligence solutions are designed to help organisations identify, quantify and manage risk and avoid potential security breaches and a lack of compliance. These services constantly analyse security data from access governance, user provisioning and password management systems, as well as from external sources, such as SIEM and DLP systems, to identify and quantify real-time access risks to vital information such as intellectual property, personal records, confidential information and customer data. This allows organisations to create in-depth graphical profiles of access risk based on analysing compliance requirements, internal policies and risk factors and classifying data into different risk levels.

By continuously monitoring and assessing patterns of user behaviour and alerting IT staff of abnormal activities such as accessing critical data from an unauthorised location or at an unusual time, IAM systems enable enterprises to leverage all this information and use predictive analytics to identify potential risk areas that need to be addressed before the risk has turned into a real threat for the business. The result is a near real-time view of access risk and a better control of access to sensitive information.
Additionally, IAM software solutions enable organisations to automate manual data sorting and scoring as well as internal security policies and compliance requirements. It allows critical information to be integrated into Enterprise Governance Risk and Compliance (eGRC) applications as part of the overall enterprise view of risk. This enables organisations to connect the changes of access rights directly to business processes such as the hiring, firing or transitioning from one position to another. What’s more, when new regulations come into practice or when a business action that impacts user access occurs, the IAM engine automatically identifies and alerts the organisation of potential policy and regulatory conflicts, eliminating time, cost and errors of manual processes. This significantly increases operational efficiency and improves control over access risk, while delivering improved security in comparison to traditional solutions.