Your organization likely realizes the unfettered access that traditional IT privileged accounts provide and has taken proactive steps to lock down access to these accounts. But what about critical business systems that offer the ability to cause reputational damage or that provide access to monetizable data, such as protected health information (PHI), credit card numbers, and social security numbers?

Traditionally, privileged accounts are IT-based and have special active directory (AD) attributes. IT administrators use them to log into servers, switches, routers, and applications and perform tasks without restriction.

Legacy security systems focus on protecting these AD privileged accounts, and with good reason: Once obtained by hackers, the accounts can be used to access the most sensitive data, lock out legitimate users, and create ghost accounts and back doors that are not easily seen.

There have been a slew of major data breaches in recent years. The number of records exposed in data breaches last year alone reached 174.4 million—close to five times the 36.6 million records exposed in 2016, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center.

The role of mobile technologies within the field of law enforcement continues to grow in both importance and number of applications. Law officers count on these technologies for much more than simply receiving dispatch calls or looking up arrest records. Officers are using mobile devices in the field for capturing photo evidence, fingerprinting suspects at the scene, conducting interviews, issuing tickets and citations, managing personnel tracking and deployment, and much more.

While complying with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) can be a challenge for any organization, there are specific hurdles to compliance for higher education. 

It’s a new year and it’s time to figure out what purchases, projects, and services your organization will need in the near future. No doubt, your wish list will far exceed your budget.

To meet your security needs within a budget, make sure you are investing enough in IT security by shoring up your identity and access management (IAM) program. In order to truly enable your business, you must first embrace security, and that means putting IAM at the core of your security program.

Despite the risks associated with remote third-party access and the ongoing slew of data breaches resulting from third-party breaches, outsourcing isn’t going away anytime soon. On the contrary, IT outsourcing will be a $335 billion industry by 2019, according to Gartner. The benefits to business productivity, efficiency, and collaboration are simply too great, and modern enterprises can’t compete without opening up their infrastructures and data.

The majority of major data breaches in recent years have resulted from hackers gaining access to unmanaged and unprotected privileged accounts and credentials.

Privileged and services accounts are a significant risk because of the access they provide the user with access to an organization’s systems and data. These accounts can be used to access the most sensitive data, lock out legitimate users, and create ghost accounts and backdoors that are not easily seen.

Another year, another Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), another depressing look into the state of global cybersecurity preparedness.  

Within every market—whether it be government, business, healthcare or education—it’s crucial that identity and access management (IAM) solutions are designed and implemented with close adherence to the latest government, regulatory, and best practice security frameworks and laws, in order to help organizations meet their compliance goals and to ensure the integrity and security of their user data.