How an Access Management Policy Can Help Your Business

As you manage your business, there is a lot that you’re going to have to oversee - including how much access your employees have to the data you have gathered and generated throughout your operations. An access management policy can help you to accomplish this. Listed below is a review of a critical features you need to include in your strategy.

Control Access, Based on Role

How many people outside of your accounting department need to view the business’ financials? Outside of the employees involved in managing payroll, who needs to know how much each of your employees are making? There is a lot of potentially sensitive information floating around your business, and without the right solutions in place to protect it, anyone in your business could potentially access it.

Role-based access management solutions can do a lot to help fix this issue. These solutions simplify the process by assigning permissions to roles, rather than individuals, so all a manager needs to do to remove a user’s permissions is to remove them from a certain role. As a result, it is easier to grant and rescind permissions as required without worrying about missing one in the process.

The Principle of Least Privilege

Let's touch on the concepts behind the principle of least privilege. Consider a high-ranking member of one of your departments, department A. It stands to reason that the manager of department A should be able to access all of department A’s resources and data. Nonetheless, the manager of department A probably has no need for the resources and data that department B or C have. Similarly, the managers of B and C each have complete access to the data they utilize but should not have this access to data controlled by other departments.

Access control creates a relatively simple system of enforcing this kind of specified access.

Multifactor for Multi-Layers of Protection

On paper, passwords should be the apex of security measures, but they have proven over and over again to be less than adequate for security. The reasons for this: the technology available to decipher passwords is advanced enough to do so much faster, and users aren’t creating them to the standard that “the apex of security measures” should be held to.

Chances are the second reason is the one that will give you more trouble. When you consider that the launch code for the entirety of the United States’ nuclear arsenal was simply “00000000” for almost two decades, how likely does it seem that one of your employees has become too relaxed in their passwords?

Thus, it makes sense to protect your resources by requiring multiple factors of authentication. Typically, to log into a system and access its data, you're required to provide your identity via a username, and verify that identity through an agreed-upon form of authentication - traditionally, the password. Still, if that password is easily guessed or cracked, that alone isn’t technically enough to fully verify that a user is who they say they are.

That’s why multifactor was developed. It takes one factor - the password - and requires another in addition to it to fully confirm an identity. Preferably, this additional factor wouldn’t be another password; it may be biometrics, or a physical security key, or a code that is generated on demand.

You have a lot of power when it comes to controlling your organization's data, so you need to find a balance between access and restriction that both protects this data and allows your business to leverage it to its full potential. Macro Systems can help! Reach out to us and learn more by calling 703-359-9211.