Cloud Services Identity & Access Management

Conditional Access is a solution that is specific to Microsoft Azure Active Directory, and its functions are consistent with the objectives of IAM. With Conditional Access, businesses are empowered to establish “signals” such as user and device status as conditions for access to different portions of the organization’s network. Conditional Access allows a business to create authentication and access policies using “if-then” statements that grant access, stipulate levels of authentication, or block access based on pre-established conditions. Conditional Access setup can be complex, but as a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Modern Work, NexusTek has the expertise to guide customers through the process to ensure that policies are restrictive enough to keep unwanted users out while also not unduly burdening or inconveniencing employees.

It’s true that the extra step required to authenticate your identity with MFA can be frustrating for some employees. Routine cybersecurity awareness training can help to ease some of that frustration, as it helps employees to understand how much harder it is for cybercriminals to hack their accounts if they use MFA. But from the enforcement angle, you can simply institute a policy requiring that employees use MFA, and then have your IT team limit employees’ administrative access so that they do not have the option to disable MFA.

Zero trust is a security model that has arisen in response to the growing complexity of securing infrastructure in the age of cloud computing and remote network access. Because business IT infrastructure and users are now less likely to be fully contained within a designated office or worksite that can be secured by a firewall, new security methods are needed to separate a company’s authorized users from unauthorized actors. And this is where zero trust comes in—with a zero trust approach, a business denies access to its systems by default, assumes that threats are ever-present, and requires explicit verification of authorized users at every step. The identity management aspect of IAM clearly aligns with these aims of the zero trust model, placing stringent authentication requirements in place to keep unauthorized parties from logging in from remote locations. The access management aspect of IAM aligns with the least-privilege access principle of zero trust, which stipulates that each authorized user should have specifically defined levels of access to system functionality and data. Adhering to a least-privilege policy means that each user is given only the level of access they require to do their jobs, and no more.

This is important for a variety of reasons. For one, you clearly would not want users such as partners or contractors to have access to applications like customer relationship management software or your human resources database. But there are also cybersecurity advantages of limiting employees’ access to specific segments of the system. For example, most employees have no need to access financial information, such as payroll, taxes, and accounting records. Using access management to limit employee access to such sensitive information enhances cybersecurity because, if a threat actor should circumvent the identity authentication system and gain access to, say, a customer service representative’s account, they would not be able to easily get their hands on the types of sensitive information they are likely looking for. Although skilled threat actors might be able continue to hack their way into different portions of a company’s network once they breach one user’s account, the barrier created by IAM’s access management capacities have the effect of slowing them down. This gives other components of the company’s cybersecurity program time to identify and contain the threat. In this example, a company using Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions would be well-positioned to spot the aberrant behavior and contain the hacker’s activity, effectively ending the security incident.