The 3 Challenges That Impact Your Organization’s Compliance, Security, and Productivity
There are specifically three challenges that can impact an organization’s ability to maintain compliance, security, and productivity: Lack of traditional security perimeters, time-consuming manual business processes, and no agile access management strategy.
Compliance, security, and productivity. These three words have been on the mind of IT professionals, CIOs, and CISOs for ages. Enterprises today face many challenges when it comes to data protection and cybersecurity. These challenges come in the form of constant high-level security needed to protect business-critical data combined with the employee expectation of an efficient and productive working environment.
The way we work is changing. In the past, organizations had clearly defined perimeters with well-known boundaries that could be controlled and monitored by IT. Nowadays, however, we have a more fluid business environment with more stakeholders involved in day-to-day operations. That’s why Identity and Access Management (IAM) has become increasingly important in the enterprise space – especially when it comes to compliance, security, and productivity successfully aligning.
There are specifically three challenges that can impact an organization’s ability to maintain compliance, security, and productivity.
Challenge 1: Organizations No Longer Have Traditional Perimeters
The first challenge comes from organizations no longer having traditional perimeters. In the past, an organization’s perimeter was defined by its physical walls and doors, such as in a corporate office building or retail store.
However, with the advent of cloud computing and mobile devices, organizations are now connecting their networks to other businesses through shared facilities like data centers and even public Wi-Fi hotspots. This means that organizations can no longer rely on the perimeter security model.
The result? If the switch to an identity-driven security model is not made, the organization will be severely challenged. In a security model driven by identity, only properly authenticated and verified users or devices can access the corporate network – but they can do so from anywhere.
When the traditional perimeter is eliminated what each user and device are allowed to do on the company network needs to be tightly monitored and restricted. This conclusively leads to a Zero Trust architecture, which cannot function without a robust IAM policy and platform.
When this is not in place it will be hard to document compliance and upkeep security – not to mention allow employees the flexibility to work productively on the corporate network across locations.
Challenge 2: Reliance on Manual Business Processes
Manual business processes are time-consuming and error-prone, which leads to high costs. They are also expensive to maintain because they require a lot of manual work for employees. They don’t scale well as the number of employees increases, which means that you need more staff to support them. It can also mean that essential tasks are underprioritized or forgotten.
This is especially true for large organizations with complex processes involving many steps and approvals.
Manual business processes do not have built-in security features like authorization management or access control. The lack of these features makes it easy for unauthorized users to access sensitive information or perform unauthorized actions on your system using your IT infrastructure.
Challenge 3: No Overview Of Who Can Access What
The third challenge that impacts your organization’s compliance, security, and productivity is the lack of overview over which employees have access to which resources.
This issue is especially problematic in large organizations where many people need to be able to access confidential information in various ways. The lack of an overview can lead to security breaches or compliance issues. Employees might quickly end up having too many unnecessary accesses, which is a liability. Both when it comes to cyber-attacks and data breaches and when it comes to terminated employees still having access to the corporate network.
A missing overview and no automatic way to handle access permissions across the organization will also result in productivity issues. If employees have less access to corporate resources than they need to work efficiently, productivity will suffer as a result.
The Solution is to Implement an Identity & Access Management platform
To get compliance, security, and productivity to successfully align, you need to implement an Identity & Access Management platform. A platform will allow you to manage who can access which resources across the organization, maintain high-level identity-driven security, and easily document compliance.
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