Authorization management is the art of assigning the right rights to the right person.
It's simple: if you're a sales person, you need to have very specific software and rights levels according to your hierarchical level or skills.
If there's a discrepancy, we have to readjust.
It sounds simple, but when applied to a company, it's not so obvious.
So what's the point in doing it? Because there are safety and risk management issues at stake. There are several points to check in a review of authorizations:
- Unused accounts, duplicate accounts, orphan accounts
- Aligning user rights
- Definition of resource requirements for each type of user
- Authorization levels and higher will be more closely monitored
All with a view to protecting against cyber risks. Fighting cyber-attacks is of little use if you don't control internal human risks. Authorization management is precisely the system for regulating employee access.
Authorization management in 7 points
Here are 7 points for successful authorization management:
- Reinforced monitoring of privileged accounts.
- Automated onboarding and offboarding workflows that strictly follow predefined processes.
- The establishment of resource sensitivities to avoid focusing on each resource with the same intensity, and monitoring only the most sensitive ones.
- External staff must be controlled by the IT department in the same way as internal staff. Their rights and access must be controlled.
- Regular clean-up of duplicates, orphan accounts and anomalies.
- Regular verification of rights.
- Sanctions for breaches of security measures by management bodies.
Please note that these are general rules, and that you need to apply them intelligently to ensure that your authorization management is sustainable over time.
To ensure the success of this project, there are 3 key elements to bear in mind:
- rigor,
- a commitment from the IT team,
- a functional process.
The idea is to provide security for the company, not to waste your time and discourage you from doing it. There are many solutions on the market, more or less costly and complex, which can help you in your process. Don't hesitate to ask us for more information!
