One of the biggest benefits of cloud computing is the level of accessibility it enables – from anywhere, and at any time. However, it is important to set up certain restrictions in order to protect your sensitive applications and privileged user accounts from being compromised.
One such important security measure involves setting up a device policy within your organization. Continue reading Enforce Device-based Restrictions with Akku
When large organizations like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook report password hacks, it throws some light on how vulnerable current systems are, as well as the need for multi-factor authentication. However, multi-factor authentication is shrouded in myths that may prevent organizations from adopting it.
Here, we have addressed a few of the most common myths surrounding multi-factor authentication. Continue reading Myths about Multi-factor Authentication
When in action, a social engineering attack could look like an email received from a government organization or your own organization asking your employees to divulge their credentials. The basis of social engineering attacks is to induce fear or urgency in unsuspecting users and employees into handing over sensitive information. Over the years, these attacks have become more sophisticated – even if you open a mail or message from a possible attacker, malware is immediately installed on your system. Continue reading Identity and Access Management for Social Engineering Attacks
When the digital revolution started, media companies were among the first ones to embrace it. Today, most media companies create content targeted exclusively at online subscribers on digital platforms, pivoting their efforts to become more user-friendly for a digital audience.
In order to convert free digital users into paid users, it is also important to effectively profile them and target the right ads to the right users. Therefore, it becomes crucial to learn more about the users logging in to view media content – whether on an online magazine or a video streaming platform. At the same time, user information that is collected online needs to be safeguarded and the methods used for data handling must adhere to strict regulations. Continue reading Overcoming the Challenges of the Media Industry With Identity
Security vs. usability – the debate has been around for quite a while now. Which one would you prioritize? Would you consider convenience more important than security when it comes to the identity management of consumers? What are your users more inclined to? Is there a way to find a balance between the two? Continue reading Security vs. Usability
Best practices and common sense dictate that we use unique, hard-to-guess passwords for each application that we use. However, most of us place convenience over security and give in to the worst password habit – using a single, easy-to-remember password across all our applications. This is simply because of the management of multiple passwords, each following different password policy rules, can be difficult. The problem with this approach is that our single password if hacked or even guessed successfully, can be used in a credential stuffing attack to gain access to several of our personal accounts. Continue reading Web Authentication – The Future of Going Passwordless
ADFS (Active Directory Federation Services) is an SSO solution created by Microsoft to authenticate users logging into applications which are incompatible with Integrated Windows Authentication (IWA) and Active Directory (AD).
ADFS provides organizations with the flexibility needed to simplify the user experience while improving the control that admins have over user accounts across owned as well as third-party applications. Since ADFS implements SSO, your employees are required to remember only one set of credentials for all the applications. Continue reading What is ADFS and why do you need it?
For organizations, it is crucial to ensure data security and, therefore, IAM has become a crucial part of every network security effort. Identity and access management at the organization-level – mostly include IAM solutions for enterprise applications used by organizations to authenticate and validate employees and a relatively small number of users. But how different is the situation with B2C businesses and other organizations who have huge numbers of internal and external users using their online services every day? Continue reading Customer Identity and Access Management – How is it different from IAM?
The employee lifecycle is an HR model that identifies the different stages an employee goes through during his/her stint at an organization. Employee lifecycle management, therefore, involves the steps taken by HR in optimizing the flow of the cycle. Typically, the employee lifecycle involves the following stages: recruiting, onboarding, training and development, retention, and offboarding.
In modern organizations, where the employee is also a user (of one or more applications), a similar user lifecycle begins at the onboarding stage and continues until the employee exits the organization.
When it comes to the efforts involved in the user lifecycle management, both the HR and the IT teams have roles to play. The process involves creating user accounts and user roles, assigning permissions, setting up custom restrictions, continually monitoring user activity, modifying user roles, keeping employees compliant, disseminating mandatory and relevant training material, and finally, removing access when they offboard.
Here’s how Akku can make user lifecycle management easy for you:
Onboarding
With Akku’s single sign-on admin dashboard, multiple user accounts to different applications can be created and assigned to a single set of credentials for the user, all in a few clicks. Through this dashboard, user roles and permissions can also be assigned easily, saving time and improving efficiency at the onboarding stage.
With Akku for user lifecycle management, the organization can ensure user account provisioning on the employee’s very first day at the organization so that new employees can hit the ground running.
User Management & Usage Analytics
Akku provides administrators with granular control over user access to data and apps. When employees are promoted or moved internally within the organization to newer roles, it only takes minutes to reassign permissions to existing apps or add new apps into the employee’s kitty.
By checking a user’s real time access and use of each assigned application, Akku also helps to reassign permissions or remove accounts that may not be necessary for a particular user. Akku also allows IT to more easily conduct audits by keeping an audit trail in reports that specify when users were provided or revoked certain levels of access and who has assigned these permissions.
Compliance & Communication Management
Akku enables you to keep your users updated, well trained and compliant through effective communication with its Internal Communication feature. Through this feature, HR and IT administrators can share information and updates, either addressing them to all users within the organization or with specific departments alone. The same feature can also be used to disseminate training material to upskill and qualify users for a future-ready workforce.
Not only does Akku help in disseminating information and training material, it also allows for tracking user viewing and consumption of these communications.
Deprovisioning
During the course of an employee’s stay at the organization, he/she may have accessed and used different corporate applications. When the employee leaves the organization, it is critical to revoke access to all of those applications promptly. If this activity is missed, even for a single account in a single application, the organization is risking compromise and misuse of organizational data.
With Akku’s single sign-on dashboard offering a complete and comprehensive view of all accounts and applications accessed by a user, deprovisioning of access to all of them is only clicks away.
Akku offers a comprehensive solution to corporate identity lifecycle management. To know more about the features and applications of Akku, get in touch with us today!
Online identity theft, simply put, is impersonation on an online platform. If someone else pretends to be you — either by stealing your credentials and logging into your account or by creating a fake account that others believe is yours – then your identity has been stolen.
There are a number of ways – data breaches, phishing, mishandled passwords, and more – through which personal data collected by an organization can be compromised, giving rise to the risk of identity theft. There are also a number of ways in which Akku, the Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution by CloudNow, can help you prevent it. Continue reading Prevent Online Identity Theft with Akku
