Whether you need to comply with HIPAA, PCI, ISO, or other industry regulations, the way you provision (and deprovision) users in your organization plays a big role in your compliance. Here are three steps to tighten control of user identities, improve provisioning processes, and take steps toward achieving regulatory compliance.

Three Tips to Leverage Provisioning for Compliance

1. Implement Central Identity and Access Management

A key tool in achieving regulatory compliance is a centralized identity and access management (IAM) solution. Centralized IAM offers control, security, and visibility throughout an IT environment and stems identity sprawl. Modern cloud directory services fill this central IAM role because they’re natively designed to connect users with a full suite of IT resources, including systems, applications, networks, and files.

Rather than managing a legacy on-prem directory like Active Directory^®, a Google Cloud™ Identity directory for G Suite™ access, or a host of third-party vendors to federate identities to various resources, an IT admin can use a cloud directory service to provision and manage all user access from a single solution. A cloud directory service is preferable to using a collection of solutions that each only cover one aspect of an overall IT environment.

A cloud directory service can also aid in implementing a least privilege user management framework in which users and systems have access only to the resources they absolutely require to get their jobs done. From it, you can enforce key regulatory security configurations too, like enforcing full disk encryption on machines, requiring strong passwords and multi-factor authentication wherever possible, and implementing screen lock policies.

The true value in this approach is that you have clarity about who has access to what, and you can provide or revoke access in one touch.

2. Automate User Provisioning

Automation is another aspect to consider, especially as an organization scales, but automated workflows can be difficult to implement with traditional IAM solutions. From a cloud directory service, however, an IT admin can then automate user provisioning workflows easily. If you have defined and systematic workflows, you can more easily demonstrate compliance. This has the (Read more…)