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Friday 29 March 2024
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What are the Benefits of IAM Systems and How Do They Work?

What are the Benefits of IAM Systems and How Do They Work?

Integrating IAM or Identity and Access Management and the best practices associated with it provides you with a competitive advantage in many ways. These days, most businesses are required to provide the users outside their business access to their internal systems. Keeping your network open to the customers, suppliers, partners, contractors and employees help in increasing the efficiency and lower the operating costs.

Here are some more benefits of IAM security:

  • Identity management system lets a company to extend its access to its information systems across a multitude of on premises apps, SaaS tools, and mobile apps with zero compromises with the security. By offering a greater access to the outsiders, you can evoke collaboration throughout your firm, enhancing your productivity levels, research and development, employee satisfaction and eventually, the revenue.

  • It helps in reducing the number of help desk calls to IT support teams which are related to password resets. Identity management systems let the administrators automate these calls and other time consuming, expensive tasks.
  • Identity management systems can be a cornerstone of a sturdy secure network as managing the user identity is important for the access control picture. Identity management systems need the companies to define their access policies particularly outlining the ones who have access to which data resources and under what conditions.
  • In turn, the well maintained identities mean more control on the user access, which transforms into an eliminated risk of internal and external breaches. This is important, as the internal threats are too frequent. Around 60 percent of all the data breach cases have been caused by an employee of their own client organization. Of those, 75 percent were ill intended and 25 percent were accidental.
  • These systems can bolster regulatory compliance by offering the tools required to implement comprehensive security, audit, and access policies. Many systems offer features to make sure that an organization is in compliance.

How IAM works?

In the past years, a usual IAM had four basic elements:

  1. A directory of the personal data the system utilizes to define the users (identity repository)
  2. A set of tools for adding, modifying, and deleting data (access lifecycle management)
  3. A system that regulates user access
  4. An auditing and reporting system

Regulating the user access has involved a multitude of authentication techniques for verifiying the user identity, including passwords, tokens, digital certificates, and smart cards. Hardware tokens and sart cards act as two factor authentication which combines your password with the token in order to verify your identity. A smart card bears an embedded integrated circuit chip that can be a secure microcontroller.

In today’s environment, with the heightened security threats, a strong user name and password is simply not enough. The IAM systems often integrate elements of biometrics, AI, machine learning, and risk based authentication.

At the user level, these authentication methods help in protecting these identities in a better way. For instance, the famous Touch ID enabled iPhones have evoke many people to use their fingerprints as a means of authentication method. The newer Windows 10 computers provide fingerprint sensors or iris scanning for biometric user authentication.