A hand touching a tablet. There is a red and blue binary overlay. The tablet displays connected computers, security, lock, a fingerprint and mail. There is a large red error/warning symbol in the center.

Identity Access Management (IAM) is a business enabler. It improves productivity of new employees as they would have immediate access to the resources they need and get straight to work. On the other hand, it also prevents data theft from disgruntled employees who were off-boarded. And there are many more benefits to IAM. What are key indicators that your IAM system is not as efficient / effective as it used to be.

In an article by Andy Taylor, “Five Signs of Identity Governance Trouble”, he lists the 5 leading signs of Identity Governance difficulties. And these signs have contributed to many of the high-profile breaches and data loss incidents. Additionally, according to IBM X-Force Data, 60% of most attacks was from the inside.

The Five Warning Signs

1. Orphaned Accounts

Has the employee been off-boarded, but his/her account is still active in the company? And this employee was assigned access through “Give Bob the access, Alice has”. Firstly, this is dangerous because does Bob really need all the access Alice has? Additionally, the employees still have access to sensitive data and can lead to fraudulent activities.

2. Poorly Defined Certification Process

For most organizations this is a tedious task, because this process appears to frequently and the warning or notification it provides does not make sense to a non-technical manager, supervisor or what have you. Additionally, this can be time consuming especially if the certification process is poorly designed. And this all leads again to user identities having access to resources they should not have access too.

3. Inadequate Access Requests Approvals

Providing access to an employee must always be done by the business person than the IT personnel, because the business person has a better understanding of what & why the employee needs access to the specific resources. However, some access approval includes inappropriate approvers for requests. Self-selection of approvers is the common problem. An example is and IT employee requesting business access yet only being approve by IT approvers.

4. Lack of Segregation of Duties (SOD)

One employee cannot and should not do the tasks of two or more employees. Most companies have difficulty with this because of their lack of knowledge about their applications and their usage across business functions.

5. Independent Process Across the Organization

Some organizations are still raising and duplicating requests manually in cross-business systems that have not been integrated. Others have numerous user administration teams performing similar functions; there may be a team to create the account, a team to add the entitlements, a service desk to issue the password, teams for software drops, etc. These costly and inefficient provisioning processes result in poor user experiences.

Does any of these sound familiar? Worry not with the right IAM solution you can minimize the security risks. And you will be able to focus on what you do best!

Five Signs Your Identity Access Management System is Failing

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