While balancing compliance and efficiency can be challenging, it is vital to your business’s growth. By fostering a culture of compliance, implementing automation, and performing regular risk assessments, you can ensure that your company is operating within legal guidelines and protecting the interests of both its employees and clients. In the face of growing cybersecurity risks, organizations must balance their need to protect data with their desire to remain competitive in their markets and meet customer demands. Creating a solid risk-and-compliance function will help your organization move forward, even during challenging times.
Identifying the Business Needs
One of the most essential elements of business alignment is a clear vision of how information assets support enterprise direction. This includes a definition of value and a clear understanding of how IAM and enterprise information management (EIM) contribute to this goal. Ensuring security measures align with the company’s goals and objectives will help mitigate risks and protect the organization. This is the reason it’s essential to have business-to-IT alignment when implementing an IAM solution. With it, the solution will meet the business’s needs. It’s also essential to have a holistic approach to risk management and include governance, compliance, and security in the business strategy. For example, IAM solutions that allow for roles, contexts, and policies to be defined based on each user’s job (business alignment) make it easier for IT to manage users. This can reduce the number of access requests they receive and enable automation for tasks such as deactivating or activating a user’s account during termination processes. It can also help ensure that access to systems is only granted to those with the proper authority – critical to meeting an organization’s compliance and risk management requirements.
Identifying the Key Stakeholders
To ensure that IAM projects are aligned with business needs, stakeholders must be kept informed throughout the process. This helps to establish project goals and outline expectations, ensuring communication and communication are communicated effectively along the way. While Identity Access Management (IAM) is a very technical function, many aspects are closely tied to business needs. For example, authorization processes allow organizations to assign access rights to users based on their job role or on attributes that they share (such as location or department). This saves IT time and resources by eliminating the need to create individual access rights, but it also improves security and compliance by only providing access to the relevant data. A well-implemented IAM program can also provide valuable information about how employees and customers use applications. The security team can use this to detect suspicious behavior or identify trends that may indicate a breach.
Creating a Business Strategy
Creating a business strategy is the next step in aligning IAM with business needs. A business strategy focuses on what the company can and should do to achieve its goals. It examines the company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It also identifies ways to create a competitive advantage and achieve long-term success. A good business strategy will set clear and measurable goals. It will also include a SWOT analysis that helps understand what the company can and cannot do to meet its objectives. Business alignment starts with imagination and goals. These could be ‘business as usual’ initiatives that deliver improvements within a department or big hairy goals that drive transformation. Either way, they must be clear and focused. An exhaustive list of goals without a clear link to resource constraints will set you up for failure. Once you know what you want to achieve, the next step is identifying projects, examples of minimum viable product and their impact on those goals. It’s essential to prioritize these projects based on their potential for delivery on time and within budget and the value they will deliver against those goals. Once these projects are identified, mapping them to the appropriate IAM processes is possible. For example, IAM policies can be defined to simplify onboarding for new employees and reduce time to productivity using roles. Similarly, access provisioning can be automated to limit or provide access based on policy rather than manually providing each user with their security settings.
Creating a Business Plan
Creating a business plan forces a company to confront issues in a structured way. It helps leaders understand the drivers behind an IAM project, sets clear expectations for its outcomes, and enables champions to justify the investment. While IAM is primarily considered an IT function, ensuring explicit strategic alignment between IT efforts and the business is critical. Failure to achieve this can lead to failed IAM projects and blocked business maturity growth. IAM solutions must help a company mitigate risks and comply with regulatory requirements. Failure to enact these measures can result in audit findings and penalties threatening the business’s reputation.
Moreover, cybercriminals are increasingly targeting users with existing access, and IAM must be able to identify these compromised users and revoke their access. Depending on the project’s goals, a business plan can be either traditional or lean. The traditional format includes market analysis, the problem or need your solution addresses, an executive summary, the founding team and owners, the product’s consumer benefits, financial projections, and more.