Much like an airport safely moves travelers to their desired destinations, your IT infrastructure is a vital hub between users and data.

An airport verifies the identity of everyone within its walls—from passengers and pilots to vendors and baggage handlers. These groups of individuals have varying levels of security clearance based on responsibilities, roles and unique attributes, such as airline status or members of the flight crew. And no matter what, they all expect a seamless and safe experience.

The same applies to your users. They’re unique individuals who need to get their jobs done without interruption or difficulty. At the same time, they expect you to enforce sufficient levels of security to safeguard them and your systems against data breaches and malicious attacks. That means you have to keep a watchful eye over potential security threats while efficiently guiding users to the data and resources they need.

When you purchase a plane ticket, the details you provide—like your identity, destination and seating preference—are used to automatically create a ticket. Your ticket entitles you to access everything you’ll need to get from point A to point B.

Your ticket grants certain levels of access and comes with guarantees, like compensation in case your flight is canceled, your baggage is lost, or your flight is overbooked. If you change your itinerary, the airline modifies your reservation and adjusts your ticket as necessary.

Identity Governance & Administration solutions work in the same way. When users join your organization, they’ll need access to certain IT systems and applications. Good identity governance ensures that these entitlements are provided appropriately, securely and without delay.

IBM Security Identity Governance & Intelligence (IGI)

While traditional Identity Management focuses on IT processes such as user provisioning and authorization, IBM Security Identity Governance & Intelligence (IGI) goes further to address the business requirements of line of business owners, risk and compliance managers and auditors through comprehensive compliance and analytics capabilities.

IGI manages the lifecycle of identities and corresponding entitlements. This enables you to confidently and securely grant and revoke access rights within your organization and provides a system of checks and balances around identity and access to prevent users from having excessive access to data.

With IGI you’ll be able to improve visibility into how access is deployed, prioritize compliance actions with risk-based insights and gain actionable intelligence for better decision-making.

Automate lifecycle management

Provisioning and deprovisioning the access rights for “joiners, movers and leavers” becomes automatic. This means your users are up and running seamlessly with immediate access to the applications they need.

Prevent “rubber stamp” approvals

Give managers business-friendly information to help with the approval and attestation processes, freeing them from cryptic IT jargon that could otherwise result in increased risk through bulk approvals. Leverage identity analytics to consume identity-related risk insights that empower managers with decision support by highlighting users, entitlements, and applications that should go through recertification.

Implement separation of duties (SoD)

Enable a business activity-based approach to risk modeling. Traditional SoD relies on role-based risk models, but IGI offers a more efficient process to help auditors make sense of SoD.

A business activity is a specific task such as creating a purchase order or updating a client account. Business activities can be directly associated with specific business processes within industries, such as banking, retail or healthcare. Compared to the content within roles, business activities are more permanent in nature and are considered to be a more reliable base for implementing SoD policies. When you move risk modeling from roles to business activities, you provide an auditor-friendly view of SoD policies and violations. This translates entitlements into easily understandable risk identifiers that an auditor or a compliance officer can make sense of and act upon.

Your users also have different access needs, depending on their roles within your organization or customer status. This is part of Privileged Access Management (PAM), a crucial solution necessary to maintain the integrity and guarantee the rights of privileged accounts that exist in many forms across your IT environment. When not protected, managed and monitored properly, privileged accounts can pose significant security risks. Just imagine a disgruntled airline employee entering a control room because they had excessive access; they could shut down an entire airport!

IBM Security Secret Server

IBM Security Secret Server is a full-featured PAM solution that allows you to protect and manage all privileged access and accounts within your organization. This includes individual users as well as shared accounts such as administrative or service accounts. IBM Secret Server lets you quickly discover, control, manage and protect privileged accounts and store credentials confidently in a secure password vault.

IBM Security Secret Server makes it easy to manage privileges throughout their lifecycle, automating manual processes through policy-based controls. Credentials are stored in a secure password vault, and built-in password changing and expiration schedules ensure critical passwords are changed automatically without manual intervention.

Meanwhile, you’re able to get ahead of compliance and evolving regulations while ensuring authorized users have access to the tools and information they need.

IBM Security Privilege Manager

IBM Security Privilege Manager is a comprehensive endpoint privilege management and application control solution that prevents malware from exploiting applications on endpoints through least privilege policies. IBM Privilege Manager removes local administrative rights from endpoints at once without causing any friction to slow productivity. It uses policy-based controls to elevate applications users need to do their jobs, without requiring administrative credentials or requesting IT support. By doing this, you’ll tighten your attack surface and avoid spending time and resources on reactive detection and remediation. Enterprises and fast-growing teams can manage hundreds of thousands of machines through IBM Privilege Manager, with built-in application control and actionable reporting that demonstrates value to executives and auditors.

Run discovery and remain in control

The first step in managing privileged accounts is finding accounts you don’t know exist. IBM Secret Server’s Discovery quickly scans your network to find and take over unmanaged privileged, shared and service accounts.

Monitor and control privileged accounts

Maintain a full audit trail for your critical systems by recording remote sessions. IBM Secret Server provides real-time session monitoring and control including proxying, session recording, and keystroke logging.

Implement a least privilege model

With IBM Security Privilege Manager, least privilege via application control reduces the attack surface by restricting the applications allowed to run, the devices allowed to connect, and the actions a system can perform.