Cyber security as a corporate risk topic has maintained its status as a top priority for businesses and federal agencies nationwide. While most attention tends to focus on preventing external threats and coordinated cyber attacks, one critical vulnerability often overlooked involves managing user access—specifically, the ability to modify or revoke permissions when a user’s role or responsibilities change.
User Access & Risk
In today’s complex business environments, organizations rely on data management systems that allow various levels of individual or role-based user access permissions. Whether due to concerns about privacy protection, safeguarding proprietary information, or maintaining regulatory compliance, organizations need to ensure that individual user accounts within their systems are only able to access or edit data that align with their individual established business processes or roles at any given time.
However, failure to update or remove user access permissions when they are no longer required (e.g. when an employee changes roles or leaves the organization) poses a significant cyber security risk. This oversight can create vulnerabilities, leaving organizations exposed to potential data breaches.
While smaller organizations may find it easier to update user access permissions to reflect evolving business needs or staffing changes, ensuring real-time updates to hundreds or even thousands of individual user permissions within larger organizations can present a real challenge, and subsequently, a serious cyber security risk.
User Access & Data Management Solutions
Many organizations utilize data management systems that automatically adjust or revoke user access controls when they can plan on when those permissions will no longer be necessary for an individual user (e.g. project timelines, business process stages, etc.). However, it becomes more challenging to manage user access when changes to a user account are unpredictable (e.g. an employee resigns, or a company laptop is lost or stolen). In these cases, it is critical to adopt and implement internal user access management solutions that rely on automated user account monitoring mechanisms that help ensure all user account permissions reflect an organization’s permission guidelines at any point in time.
Our expertise in developing these types of data management solutions for our federal clients has helped them to augment end-user permission oversight functions within large, complex data environments. Our Consensus Solutions team recently worked with client leadership within the VA’s Office of Information Technology to develop a new custom Power Apps tool that automatically monitors individual user account activity in accessing information-sensitive databases, and then automatically removing access permissions after a defined period of inactivity from a particular user account. In this way, our automated tool ensured user access permissions aligned to an established business process as a metric for evaluating the justification of an individual user account maintaining a particular series of permissions.
By leveraging these types of custom cyber security and data management solutions, organizations can feel more confident that their data remains safe from this less talked about type of cyber security vulnerability.
