If you had to make a check-list of things to focus on, so you can keep your organization secure while ensuring it is at its productive best, Identity Governance (IG) will definitely be in the top half of the list. IG ensures the right people have right access to the right resources at the right time. Implementing this involves having a standardized process and a constant updation of access policies, which is tedious and time-consuming.

Hence, most organizations end up heading down the primrose path and grant more than required level of permissions to access resources. This is a security loophole which makes the organizations vulnerable to threats.

This series focuses on effective management of access permissions in Active Directory will give you insights on a few critical challenges and how ADManager Plus solves them easily.

Challenge 1: Lack of well-defined access management policies

Solution: Access Policies need to be standardized across the organization based on specific criteria like roles, hierarchical position or titles held by the employees.

A better solution: ADManager Plus' customizable templates, group management and file management actions will help you implement or apply access policies based on the role or designation of employees accurately and automatically.

Challenge 2: Unauthorized escalation of privileges

Solution: Have a well-defined approval mechanism for authorizing access to critical resources, elevation of users' rights, and changes to privileged accounts.

A better solution: Make use of multi level approval based workflow feature in ADManager Plus to have an organization-wide approval process in place for efficient access management.

Challenge 3: Losing track of who has what level of access to critical data

Solution: Constant updation and revoking of permissions and ensuring that the principle of least privilege access policy is in place.

A better solution: Schedule reports on folder permissions access privileges, security group membership, including nested group membership, to be periodically delivered through email for IT managers, security teams, and other appropriate stakeholders using ADManager Plus' built-in reports and report-scheduler.

Challenge 4: Manually cleaning up access privileges is time consuming and risk prone.

Solution: Immediately revoke permissions for de-provisioned user accounts and clean-up stale accounts routinely.

A better solution: ADManager Plus can help you automate access management and clean-up of stale accounts without PowerShell scripting.

Watch this space next week to know how to use ADManager Plus to drive away your access management blues.