As the volume of SaaS adoption grows and Cloud Identities footprints expand, IAM solutions are now a critical component in the enterprise security strategy to prevent identity driven threats, including attack scenarios like identity theft, captured credentials, misconfigurations and lateral movement.
What is IAM?
Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a web service that helps organizations securely access Cloud Apps resources. Organizations use IAM to manage their authentication (who is signed in) and authorization (what the user can or can not do).
While other security methodologies like vulnerability assessment are aiming to reduce the external threats landscape, IAM solutions protect you from both external and internal threats like a laid off worker that uses company credit cards or steals sensitive information.
With Saasment you can automatically find and fix security risks to prevent human error across your cloud assets.
Perform IAM Risk Assessment
SaaS enterprise security risk assessments are performed to allow organizations to assess, identify and enhance their overall SaaS security posture. IAM Risk Assessment focuses on understanding what are the security gaps from the identity and access perspective, for example, if users can disable their MFA or set a weak password.
The results of the IAM Risk Assessment will help the CISO to prioritize the resources. For this process is required to obtain organizational management’s commitment to allocate resources for implementing appropriate SaaS security posture.
IAM Risk Assessment as a Security Control
The organization’s SaaS Perimeter is continually changing at any point of time caused by three different elements:
- Software upgrades made by the SaaS vendor, in this case the organization has no control on the process and even sometimes will not be aware of the change and its impact on the organization’s SaaS Security Posture.
- Configuration changes made by the IT, Security, Operations or Sysadmins, in this case it is almost impossible to correlate between all the different teams to predict what will be the impact on the SaaS Security Posture.
- Employee behaviours or indirect events, for example, if an employee’s credentials has been compromised, it can cause issues for the entire organization and not just the specific employee.
An IAM Risk Assessment solution automates the processes to make it much faster and easier for business managers to set the right permissions for the organization's employees, manage user entitlements and prevent insider threats.