Identity Management in the Cloud: To Secure your Data
Losing mobile devices isn’t a new problem. Ever since the first Blackberry was bestowed upon an employee, the fear of losing our mobile devices has been with us. But mobility has become much more complicated in recent years. Mobile device management (MDM) addresses part of the problem by authenticating the devices that connect to your corporate applications.
That may seem like overkill on the surface, but it’s important to remember that, in a cloud-enabled world, we don’t always know who is on the other end of that cloud. Allowing a device to have access to all of your corporate applications simply because you’ve authenticated that device is akin to giving anyone who rings your doorbell complete access to your entire home.
As companies add more cloud services to their IT environments, the process of managing identities is getting more complex. When companies use cloud services – services they don’t control themselves – they still must develop sound policies around role-based access. They still must grant rights to users who need information to get work done. And they must be able to automatically take away those privileges when people leave a company or change roles.
On top of it all, companies using cloud services are also bound by any compliance rules that govern their identity and access management (IAM) initiatives. The fact that business applications often live in the cloud, rather than the corporate data center, means that enterprises need to expand their trust zones.
Cloud Identity Management: a single, overarching system of identification that simplifies user authentication, authorization and access so that the secure login experience is consistent from cloud to cloud and app to app.
Read more to learn about creating a secure digital workable compromise between protection and perfection.
Author:
Mike Doherty
