According to Business Insider, 80% of people give up on their new year resolutions within the first 30 days. Don’t let your business and IT security goals fall into this trend, too!
We’re now in February, but there’s still plenty of time to salvage your new-year goals, both your IT security and personal ones. The secret to falling into that successful 20% is to chart your resolution with clear plans on how to achieve it.
As for 2022, with the continuing shift to remote and hybrid work, security threats have been on a steady rise everywhere. This is why it’s important that businesses focus on security resolutions and not just on growth and expansion. Lucky for you, this blog outlines five easy steps to streamline your IAM and, in turn, achieve your security goals for 2022. You will also learn how each step can be performed easily using the right tools.
How will this help your organization?
These simple guidelines will help you:
-
Tighten your organization’s security by reducing the attack radius and potential vulnerabilities.
-
Establish an organization-wide standard for identity and access management.
-
Fortify your organization against threats due to the sudden shift to work from home (WFH) and remote work scenarios.
-
Ensure adherence to organizational and IT security policies.
It can be quite daunting to do all this with native tools and PowerShell scripting, but tools like ADManager Plus can help you achieve your security goals and establish efficient IAM practices throughout your organization without writing complex PowerShell scripts.
5-step security plan for efficient identity and access management
1. Ensure all critical resources in the network are inventoried
Take stock of all critical resources; people who have access to those resources; users who are active, inactive, and have privileged access; all devices on the network; and the users who can access devices and resources. This helps in performing gap analysis to identify weaknesses and security vulnerabilities in the existing IAM processes.
With ADManager Plus, you can leverage over 200 pre-built reports on AD users, computers, files, and shares.
2. Review and update all access and permissions
Ensure the assigned permissions align with the principle of least privileges and role-based access control. Any residual access or permissions from the user’s previous role along with any inappropriate and excessive access should be updated. On top of this, stale accounts, orphan accounts, and shadow admin accounts should be removed to prevent exploitation by attackers.
This can be easily implemented using ADManager Plus’ reactive user management templates.
3. Ensure secure management of hybrid workforces
Legacy IAM tools are designed for in-office work scenarios. The sudden shift to WFH with many users working remotely opened the doors to a number of attacks. According to a report by the FBI, there has been a jump in the number of reported cyberattacks by 3,000-4,000 per day since March 2020—almost a 400% increase from before COVID-19. Moving forward, IAM systems need to be equipped to serve the new normal: a hybrid work scenario.
ADManager Plus makes it easy to manage users in hybrid Active Directory.
4. Set up a scalable and automated identity management process
The smartest way to deal with repetitive tasks is to automate them. Ensure you have a standard organization-wide automated system for automating user and access provisioning with workflow approvals along with scheduled cleanup of stale accounts. This will help prevent stale accounts from being exploited by potential attackers to gain access to the enterprise network or sensitive data.
Customize and automate your AD cleanup using ADManager Plus.
5. Implement a tried and tested disaster recovery plan
The loss of AD data due to accidents or deliberate attacks by cybercriminals can bring the organization to a standstill. Backing up your organization’s AD data regularly will ensure you can get your organization back on track and continue all operations with the relevant level of access permissions and rights for every single user in your organization.
ADManager Plus lets you schedule AD backups with restart-free recovery options.
Don’t put off your 2022 cybersecurity goals any longer. Get started on securing your organization with ADManager Plus. Here’s to a year of security and growth!
