Best Practices for Robust Identity Management

Strong identity authentication is more important than ever before as organizations face an expanding threat landscape and unprecedented level of attacks. This is further compounded with the rapid growth in remote work and digital interactions across multiple channels, as it introduces new challenges for security and IT teams responsible for securing their employees’ and customers’ identities. In short, verifying user identities and controlling access to sensitive data is critical, but difficult to achieve. 

A recent Forrester report, Best Practices: Identity Management and Governance, outlines these challenges, along with many others, that security and identity management teams are facing today. The report found that many organizations are overprovisioning their employees' access to systems, with research finding that breached employees had 86% more access than required. And, according to Forrester, “despite attempts to address identity sprawl, many organizations struggle to maintain a consistent, rules-based approach to centrally orchestrate the vast array of user accounts and digital access points under their stewardship,” leaving these organizations vulnerable to identity fraud and exposed to financial, legal, and reputational consequences.

It’s clear that organizations today require an automated, high-confidence method of managing access and ensuring the authenticity of all users on their network, but this is easier said than done as teams struggle to proactively mitigate the risks that dynamic users and access points create. With this in mind, Forrester outlined 10 key functional areas within identity management that organizations must prioritize, providing best practices within those specific areas. With an intelligence-driven approach to these functional areas, organizations can rest assured that they have a real-time, high-fidelity view of their identity security posture.

Automate Password Resets

Forrester reports that, “A North American healthcare organization spends $160 to $170 per employee per year on password-related issues… Automation can reduce these costs.” By automatically collecting information on compromised credentials from a vast range of open source, dark web, and technical sources, the Recorded Future Identity Intelligence module offers real-time, machine-readable intelligence that can be directly integrated with existing identity management workflows within any tool, including SOAR solutions like Swimlane. This approach enables organizations to scale their identity management processes, saving time and money for the business, while offering an unmatched source of truth for identity authenticity.

Tune Identity Analytics To Avoid False Positives

Forrester also recommends that security and identity teams “leverage analytics tools to deliver intelligence across a range of identity use cases.” Additionally, Forrester insisted that these intelligence solutions will only benefit teams if they are able to “parse the signal from the noise” and “ingest, normalize, interpret, and present the data for accurate, actionable results.” Recorded Future's Identity Intelligence module provides unmatched access to stolen credential information, related to both employee and customer identities, providing organizations with high-confidence, relevant alerts. Organizations can then confidently take action and block access to corporate systems before the compromised identities of employees are exploited, and can ensure customer credentials are secure when accessing any portals or information. This ultimately empowers organizations to be more proactive in preventing identity fraud and dramatically reduces the amount of time it takes to prioritize and respond to real risks to the business.

Forrester makes it clear that as the attack surface grows daily, organizations need to advance their security and identity practices and deepen their understanding of their threat landscape. With Identity Intelligence from Recorded Future, organizations are able to quickly detect threats and initiate downstream response workflows, disrupting adversaries before damage is done. To learn more practical steps you can implement now to inform better decisions with risk-based context, request a demo of the Identity Intelligence module and read the full Forrester report.