BARR Advisory is an Identity Management Day Champion! Here are 3 Tips from Our Associates to You
Today is the first official Identity Management Day—an effort led by the National Cybersecurity Alliance and the Identity Defined Security Alliance (IDSA) to educate business leaders and IT decision makers on the importance of identity management. BARR Advisory is proud to be an official Identity Management Day Champion—a title given to organizations that prioritize identity management and security.
Through this new annual initiative, which will take place the second Tuesday of every April moving forward, the NCSA, IDSA, and companies like BARR will provide information and tips for professionals at all levels in the hopes of better protecting their identities.
Why establish an Identity Management Day? Easy. Because protecting your identity is more important than ever before. In fact, according to the IDSA, “79 percent of organizations have experienced an identity-related security breach in the last two years, and 99 percent believe their identity-related breaches were preventable.” The IDSA also shines a spotlight on the 2020 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report which found that as many as 81 percent of hacking-related breaches leverage weak, stolen, or otherwise compromised passwords.
In honor of this global effort, we asked three BARR associates to offer up their own identity management tips. Take a look!
What is one way consumers can better protect their identity online?
“An easy way for consumers to protect their data is by being cognizant when entering financial information online. For example, if a website’s URL starts with “http://” rather than “https://”, this is a key indicator that the website is probably not a trusted source, and you should not be entering or storing your financial information on the website. The “s” is critical in that it indicates your connection is encrypted. If your connection is not encrypted, hackers can easily steal your information and access your accounts without consent. Being smart with your financial information and thinking twice before entering your credit card or account number can save you a lot of heartache and pain down the road.”
—Nicole Dillard, senior consultant, cyber risk advisory
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What is the biggest challenge BARR clients face related to identity management, and what advice would you give them?
“Many of our clients are tech startups and may not have considered a federated identity management tool, so they go through a very manual process to provision and deprovision access across multiple systems in their environment. My advice to them would be to look into identity management tools to help automate the access provisioning, review, and deprovisioning processes. These tools help mitigate the risk of manual oversights, such as over privileged or unnecessary accounts; as well as terminated users maintaining access to critical system components. Identity management tools give our clients peace of mind that access is appropriately managed.”
—Whitney Perez, manager, cyber risk advisory
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What is one way businesses can better protect their identity online?
“A great way to protect your company’s identity is to automate the process of creating, updating, and deleting user accounts in systems and applications. Because a lot of organizations are often decentralized, many applications and systems can become forgotten and do not necessarily follow the appropriate provisioning and deprovisioning processes. This could lead to unauthorized individuals having inappropriate access to systems, applications, and data.”
—Cody Hewell, senior consultant, cyber risk advisory
Contact us to find out how we can help your business strengthen its identity management and overall data privacy practices.