Automating your Gatekeeper: Information Security and Access Control
Author: Ben Demaree, Director of Product Management, SMA Technologies
Simplify your Information Security management with push-button automation
Maintaining access control is paramount...and problematic.
How many people in your organization have unnecessary access to data? It's important to ensure your organization is following fundamental requirements for data retention and storage. But while you’re preventing outside access, you also need to be thinking about interior access.
Security gets messy when access control isn't optimized. Manually assigning user permissions is not only incredibly inefficient, it's a security vulnerability. In the modern office, user access typically involves multiple databases and 5-8 applications for just a general user. Over time their needs can shift, and admins may grant them additional access to new databases or apps while forgetting to remove unneeded access to other systems they're no longer using. It's a sloppy way to do things, but it can be easy. We'll get to that in a minute.
The other piece of access control is when a user needs access to an app or database for one task or report, but the app lacks the capability of giving them granular access so they can only see the data they need to see. When someone needs to get into a bank vault to access their safety deposit box, you don't give them the keys to all the other boxes, and the same principle applies here.
Automating the solution to access control and security management
A solution to this is to automate the things keeping your IT security managers up at night. With Self Service, administrators can map out access control into workflows and greatly simplify the process. With a simple interface, it becomes easy to manage the approval and removal of access to apps and databases with the press of a button. You can also create an interface level for end-users that only need core access to do one thing, such as a financial report or something similar. Rather than giving them keys to the vault, your administrators can set up a button so the end-users can pull the data they need when they need it, without having access to other compartments.
If maintaining compliance with information security, user access, and data security regulations has been a burden for your organization, SMA Technologies would love to have a conversation with you about making life easier for you with our OpCon automation platform.
About the author:
Ben Demaree is Director of Product Management for SMA Technologies, where he bridges the gap between the clients and the development team to make sure our clients have the best tools possible to meet their automation demands. When he's not at work, Ben spends his free time with his wife and four children and an interesting variety of pets.
In this article
Controlling access to virtual assets and physical sites is essential, but tedious. This article talks about how organizations can automate these processes to create an auditable record as well as reduce the risk of missed steps.