What if Identity Security and Access Management Didn’t Exist?

Authored by Karen Kelvie, Partner Marketing at Thales, and Taylor Wiggins, Product Marketing Manager – Technology Alliance at SailPoint

In the world of tech, we love to future gaze. But while imagining potential new developments is exciting, it can be equally helpful to think about the reverse: How would things be different if certain technologies didn’t exist?

For example, let’s take identity security. Without it, managing user lifecycles efficiently would be challenging at best; achieving always-on compliance with ever-changing regulations and standards would be a pipe dream; and protecting an enterprise from escalating risks would be near impossible. Also, automation and scalability? Fuhgeddaboudit.

What about life without access management? Imagine having to remember each separate (and convoluted) password to every single application you use daily to do your job. Talk about a productivity killer.

Thankfully, in the modern workplace, identity is the heart of security. That means, when you start a new job, you don’t have to wait for IT to provision applications one by one. Instead, you get immediate access to a slate of resources relevant to your role, and if you switch to another role within the same organization, resources are automatically changed to support your new job function. Then, when you leave an organization, your access to resources is instantly terminated with a flip of a (virtual) switch. Removing access to resources immediately enables IT to limit access to authorized workers.

With access management, you don’t have to keep track of a multitude of passwords anymore because you aren’t manually entering them — so you don’t have to worry about fat-fingering your passwords and having to enter them multiple times or worry about storing those passwords in an online vault that could be breached.

The result: Life is better for everyone — employees, hiring managers, IT folks, and of course CISOs.

One thing is certainly clear, in order to keep valuable corporate data safe – and guard against the growing menace of ransomware – companies need a multi-pronged strategy with several lines of defense. Identity security and access management offer tremendous power individually and even greater power when used together, which is why we are excited about participating in Navigate 2021: Confidence Redefined together! At Navigate, you can find more information on our joint solution, and learn how SailPoint and Thales work together to bring ease of mind into your enterprise.

SailPoint’s Identity Platform gives enterprises the tools not just to maximize efficiency, but to stay fully compliant and secure. SailPoint enables organizations to make sure that users have access to the apps they need to do their job (but only apps they need), monitor whether their access is appropriate, and gain visibility into what a user is doing with that access.

The devil, of course, is in the details. How exactly do individual apps authenticate users to make sure they are who they claim to be? That’s where Thales’s access management solution, SafeNet Trusted Access, comes in. Every time a user switches to a different app, SafeNet Trusted Access checks to make sure the user is authorized to access that specific app, and then applies the right level of authentication. It’s invisible to the user, operating entirely in the background.

When you consider that 27% of organizations are using more than 50 SaaS apps, according to Thales’s 2021 Data Threat Report, streamlining authentication for those apps is critical for business. SafeNet Trusted Access functions less like a bouncer at the door and more like a bodyguard for every app, working 24/7 to keep every app – and the data behind it – safe and protected.

Like any multi-pronged solution, the power is in the partnership. So, by integrating Thales’s SafeNet Trusted Access into SailPoint’s Identity Platform, tremendous efficiency is unlocked, and value is produced across an organization. For instance

• Employees & managers get an enhanced user experience with Single-Sign-On (SSO) and passwordless authentication options.
• IT teams benefit from lighter workloads due to fewer password issues and breaches. IT admins gain the ability to configure policy-based access controls in minutes, deploy self-service tools for employees, and provide multi-factor authentication (MFA) across their digital ecosystem.
• CFOs see lower operating costs as a result of automating labor-intensive processes for lifecycle management, and see lower total cost of ownership (TCO) with cloud-based identity and access management (IAM) and identity governance & administration (IGA).
• Audit & compliance teams can consistently deliver positive reports documenting how the organization has met all the security and privacy requirements of SOX, HIPAA, GDPR and other regulations, due to improved compliance and audit performance. Additionally, teams can prove enforcement of zero trust security via granular visibility into logs of each access attempt (failed/successful).

Deploying this best-in-class identity security and access management solution gives organizations confidence in their security strategy and a real competitive edge by allowing for centralized management of the identity lifecycle and access security across all cloud environments.

Future gazing for identity security? Turns out the future is already here.

Want to learn more about our joint solution? Visit the Thales booth duringNavigate 2021: Confidence Redefined taking place online August 17-18, 2021.