IAM Compliance Audits: How to Improve Outcomes

For businesses, compliance with regulations can often appear to be restrictive, and costly and reduce the speed of business. It's still necessary to create an environment that protects not only internal data but also external constituents like partners and customers.

Highly regulated industries, such as healthcare and finance, are often faced with a variety of regulations that vary by geography and can carry steep penalties and consequences for noncompliance.

Most companies struggle to comply with regulations. In fact, Business Wire estimates that "71% of companies could potentially fail a cyber audit, which often includes identity management aspects".

What are some key compliance challenges your business may face?

1. Errors and inconsistencies resulting from repetitive manual processes
2. Complex, evolving regulations that make compliance challenging
3. Siloed environments and processes, often involving incompatible tools, or processes that do not match execution
4. Difficulty gathering and collating the data and generating reports in a timely manner

The risk of failing an audit and resulting consequences include not only the cost associated with fines and penalties, but also the risk of a breach that may be uncovered. The impact on your business relationships and your company's reputation may be even more costly.

Fortunately, the market supplies an array of identity security tools that can effectively solve these challenges and greatly simplify IAM audit compliance, while also improving IT efficiency and reducing risk. However, the terminology, marketing language and overlap of siloed solutions can lead to confusion in how to evaluate and implement these solutions. The identity security market has historically been divided into a few major categories, but recent developments regarding expanded product offerings and what has been termed convergence may be leading to greater confusion.

Identity security tools may be rightly considered as part of an IAM stack: a suite of solutions which, when used together, create a complete solution to IAM audit compliance.

• Access Management tools provide single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) which are needed to meet security and audit requirements for HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, SOC 2, and ISO 27001, among others. These tools can also ease the enforcement of least privilege policies through lightweight role-based access control (RBAC).
• Privileged Access Management (PAM) tools secure the most sensitive resources, including privileged accounts and sessions, required by standards such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, SOX, and ISO 27001. These solutions provide credential vaulting to store and rotate privileged credentials, session monitoring and recording which track privileged user actions, and access controls to enforce just-in-time access and ensure the least privilege.
• Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) solutions serve as the central hub of audit compliance, helping organizations meet requirements of HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, SOC 2, ISO 27001, SOX, CCPA, and other compliance requirements. IGA tools provide provisions for least privilege using RBAC, but additionally typically include proactive segregation of duties policy enforcement, access certifications, automated revocation of unauthorized access, and self-service access requests with auditable workflows. IGA solutions also provide centralized reporting and, when integrated with other IAM solutions, can greatly ease audit compliance by providing a single interface for auditors.

A successful IAM program provides a layered approach, with solutions in each area of access management, PAM, and IGA working together to satisfy the complex matrix of regulatory and audit compliance requirements. Additional benefits may also be realized due to improved IT automation, integration of disparate systems and greatly improved visibility across the entire IT infrastructure. All of this works together to improve efficiency and reduce risk, while streamlining audits and assurance of compliance.

IAM audit compliance does not have to be a daunting endeavor. Many tools available in the market can ease the burden of compliance and audits. The first step is understanding that a multi-prong solution is warranted, and this may result in multiple overlapping solutions being deployed for complete coverage.

About the Author: Josh Karnes is a seasoned technologist and identity security expert serving as Principal Identity Architect at One Identity since 2021, where he specializes in identity governance and administration. With over 30 years in technology, Josh is a versatile engineer and inventor, holding eight patents in fields ranging from mechanical engineering to precision time synchronization. Beyond his professional achievements, he is an accomplished musician, an aspiring novelist, and a devoted grandfather, balancing his innovative career with a rich personal life.