The Business Value of Identity and Access Management
Published On: February 3, 2025
The Rise in Importance of Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Identity and Access Management has always been an important subfield of cybersecurity, however in recent years it has made an explosive growth in criticality in the modern cybersecurity ecosystem. From the shift to work from home due to Covid-19, to 80% of cyberattacks now involving identity-based attack methods in 2024 (CrowdStrike), identity always seems to be front and center of today’s cybersecurity news and needs. As such, organizations need to maintain a strong IAM posture, both technologically and programmatically, to maintain competitive advantage in today’s market, maintain compliance, and drive business forward.
How Do IAM Policies and Procedures Help Benefit Business?
For a business to properly achieve its goals and objectives, employees must be allowed access to appropriate resources, data, and systems. This starts with proper IAM policies and procedures being established. These should serve as the framework behind everyday activities and be consistently enforced enterprise wide. Employees should know their roles in onboarding and offboarding, requesting and approving access, reviewing access on a periodic basis, and how to report incidents or issues. Having strong policies and procedures in IAM allows employees to reference defined processes which provide significant benefits to the organization.
Strong policies and procedures take the guesswork out of what to do during daily activities and during incident response situations. This improves the efficiency of the organization and creates smooth workflows and streamlines productivity. Beyond day-to-day operations, almost all cybersecurity regulations require some form of IAM practice to be in place, which begins with documentation. Lacking IAM policies and procedures will almost guarantee an audit finding, or worse, security incidents / breaches.
According to IBM, cybersecurity breaches cost organizations on average $4.88 billion USD in 2024 (IBM). Organizations that lack bolstered IAM policies and procedures, including IAM sections of Business Continuity (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR) plans, may cause investigation and remediation times to lengthen, further costing the organization money by reducing yearly revenue by a significant amount.
Policy, procedure, and staffing are the foundational components of a mature IAM program. Some organizations, however, may still require supplemental technology to help govern these elements effectively. An IAM specific technology; namely Identity Governance and Administration (IGA), becomes beneficial to these organizations to continue to push their maturity forward in the IAM space.
The Benefits of Supplementing an IAM Program with IGA Technology
Technology will always play a role in an IAM program for any organization. Multifactor Authentication (MFA) tooling, logging systems, and remote access tooling are among the most common types of IAM technology seen for operational usage. For organizations that may be larger in size, governing these IAM technologies, processes, and procedures can quickly scale to a size that is unmanageable by manual efforts. Excel sheets and staffing can only grow so much before becoming unreasonable, and the costs associated with this growing need can become too large to justify to executives or board members. This is where IAM-specific technology, known as an Identity and Access Governance (IGA) solution, can take an IAM program to the next level.
IGA tools are meant to centralize the management of account provisioning, deprovisioning, access requests, and access reviews. These tools allow organizations to have leaner, dedicated teams to manage how access is governed while removing the need for tedious spreadsheets that could be misplaced or left out of date. While there is a significant investment required as the tool is implemented and matured, the long-term impacts of these tools serve to improve the efficiency of identity-related tasks, reduce extensive staffing needs, ensure an audit trail exists for compliance, and allow for bulk remediation should an incident occur.
How Can K logix Help in the IAM Space
K logix is uniquely positioned to assist our clients with their IAM concerns both programmatically and technologically. Our K logix IAM Program Advisory Service looks at the current state and desired future state of a customer’s identity program and identifies the strengths, areas for improvement, and a roadmap of recommendations to assist with program maturation. Involving participants from across the customer organization, K logix provides recommendations that benefit the holistic organization, removing siloed and inefficient processes, and aligns the recommendations to best meet business goals and objectives. Additionally, K logix can assist with product selection based on findings from our Advisory Services and deep learnings from our Product Enablement Team.
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