In today’s IoT hyper-connected world, your company’s data and intellectual property are vulnerable from more access points by more users than ever. Employees, remote collaborators and stakeholders all have some form of access to your company’s information. Yet the question IT security professionals and business owners need to be asking is this: Do authorized users have too much privileged access for the job they’re doing?
Recent high-profile data breaches at large national retailers and international banking organizations—not to mention our own federal government agencies—have resulted in some pretty massive losses of intellectual property and sensitive personal data.
Yet the bigger threat to your company might be a little closer to home. That is, your authorized users who have legitimate access to your systems might be putting your data at risk. It’s an all-too-common problem that’s on the rise as fast-paced business changes and decentralized staffing trends make it hard to manage credentials of every user at every location every minute of the day.
If you think that your authorized users are a low priority to data security consider this: Employees who have been fired, laid off or demoted—or even temporary workers and third-party vendors—might not have your company’s best interests at heart as they exit your firm. And these potentially disgruntled partners have user access to your systems and data that makes them a pretty substantial security risk.
A single enterprise can have thousands of privileged accounts, and the risks associated with each can be insurmountable should a breach occur. Traditional data security solutions simply can’t fully protect your business, and it’s easy to see why. Many old-school tools assign too much trust to all administrators, they don’t fully protect all access points, nor do they pinpoint problems with over-privileged users whose identity credentials are valid even though their roles and responsibilities for the company have changed.
Thwart threats from the inside out
Make mitigating insider threats a top priority by adopting a privileged access management solution to eliminate the risk of entitlement creep. Protect sensitive security credentials, such as administrator passwords, with enforcement across cloud, virtual and physical environments. Not only is this a requirement for compliance, it’s also a best practice for any business that wants to protect its data, applications and networks from malicious intent.
Adopt a zero-trust mentality
Some sectors, like the payment card industry, now have requirements for secure data access that restrict password privileges to the lowest level required to perform the job at hand. Companies of any size in any industry would be smart to adopt this same less-is-more access approach to avoid too much privileged access to information. Products like CA Privileged Access Manager are built upon a “zero-trust” approach that assumes administrators can’t be trusted and it limits privilege access to the most basic access needed.
The bottom line is this: The only way to fully protect your business from a data breach is to add privilege access management to your current data security initiatives. As a CA Technologies Advanced Partner, CoreBlox offers comprehensive end-to-end identity and access management leveraging CA Privileged Access Manager to fully protect clients from vulnerabilities like entitlement creep. Contact us to see how we can control privilege access for your users.
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