As more and more companies turn to the cloud, the task of keeping everything secure is becoming increasingly challenging. Major challenges are arising in controlling access within cloud environments, making cloud-based identity and access management (IAM) increasingly challenging. The growth of software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), along with varied permissions for both internal and external users, has added complexity to managing access securely. Further, new endpoints and services are continuously emerging. Because of these factors, gaining visibility and control over access has become nearly impossible without automation. It’s like trying to keep an eye on a whole city of information without any traffic lights!
However, the consequences are serious. IBM research shows the average data breach now costs over $4.45 million, a 15% increase in just 3 years. Approximately 80% of security breaches involve misused credentials. With the increase in audits, a lack of access governance could result in crippling fines. It appears that poor identity and access management (IAM) is often the main problem. Isn’t that something worth paying attention to?
Real-World Experience in Securing Cloud Access
With extensive experience helping organizations design and optimize cloud IAM systems, I’ve seen firsthand the challenges involved. The need for access governance is not new, but cloud adoption, remote work, and reliance on microservices have made IAM more critical than ever. According to Gartner, global spend on IAM is forecasted to grow over 15% to surpass $20 billion by 2023. That’s why I’m excited to share lessons learned and best practices refined through countless real-world implementations.
In this guide, I’ll cover:
- What cloud IAM encompasses in terms of managing digital identities and access
- Why it’s essential for securing your cloud resources and workloads
- When to prioritize investing in IAM as part of your cloud journey
My aim is to create a series of articles to assist you with best practices for adopting modern identity and access management in the cloud era. These insights are based on hard-won experience, and they are designed to guide you through this essential part of today’s digital landscape.
What is Identity and Access Management in Cloud Computing?
Unlike traditional on-premise IAM focusing on internal corporate networks, cloud IAM is tailored to meet the expanded and dynamic nature of cloud environments. It provides enhanced scalability to support growing numbers of identities and devices. Cloud IAM can also reduce hardware costs compared to on-premise deployments.
In this section, I’ll provide an overview of the key components and capabilities of robust cloud IAM solutions. Whether you are new to IAM or familiar with old-school approaches, this will establish essential context regarding modern identity and access management for the cloud. We’ll cover fundamentals like core features, use cases, standards, and architecture so you have a solid understanding of how IAM works in the cloud era. Let’s start with the basics.
IAM Basics – Managing Digital Identities
Before diving into the specifics of IAM in the cloud, let’s step back and cover some essentials. What exactly is identity and access management? What core capabilities does it provide?
Identity and access management (IAM) refers to the people, processes, and technologies focused on managing digital identities and governing access to applications, data, and infrastructure. IAM establishes access policies to determine who can access what resources, under what circumstances. It aims to provision the right level of access to the right identities at the right time.
Rather than just focusing on who can access what internally like traditional IAM, cloud IAM looks at identity and access more holistically across dynamic external environments. It provides central visibility and control over the expanded boundaries of cloud computing.
Below are some capabilities that IAM solutions provide:
Identity lifecycle management
This process refers to managing user identities and access privileges throughout the entire employee lifecycle. When onboarding new users, an identity is created for them, and initial access is configured. While employed, parameters like roles and permissions are updated as needed. Finally, upon offboarding such as termination or resignation, the user’s identity and all associated access are revoked. Automated deprovisioning should occur based on status changes in HR systems. Identity lifecycle management ensures identities and access are properly configured during the start, middle, and end of employment.
Identity lifecycle management also applies to managing access for non-human entities like services, applications, APIs, bots, and machines. Identities are created and access granted when new workloads and resources are onboarded. Access parameters are updated as required during use. Upon offboarding or decommissioning, associated identities and access are revoked.
Governance and compliance
These capabilities help organizations adhere to internal governance policies and external compliance regulations related to access controls and segregation of duties. For example, financial industries have strict rules around access to financial data. IAM provides controls to restrict access to only approved individuals, require multiple approvers for sensitive transactions, and maintain audit trails of all access. These types of capabilities embedded within IAM solutions enable organizations to meet rigorous governance and compliance demands related to user access and activities.
Single Sign-On (SSO)
Single Sign-On (SSO) allows users to authenticate just once to access connected systems. This not only reduces passwords and friction for end users but also improves the overall security posture.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) strengthens security by adding additional identity verification steps, such as codes sent to a mobile device. This approach requires multiple factors like something you know (password) and something you have (mobile device) to verify identity.
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) works by assigning users access levels based on their designated roles and responsibilities. This method enhances governance by aligning access permissions to job functions rather than individual users. By aligning access with roles, RBAC enhances governance, reduces administrative overhead, and ensures a more secure and compliant environment. This method is particularly beneficial in large organizations where managing individual permissions could become unwieldy.
Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC)
Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) takes a more dynamic and context-aware approach to controlling access. Unlike RBAC, which relies solely on roles, ABAC considers various attributes such as user location, time of day, type of device, and even the current risk profile such as behavior patterns. These attributes enable a more granular control over who can access what and under what circumstances. By leveraging attributes, ABAC provides a flexible and adaptive access control system that can respond to the ever-changing needs and risks of modern business environments. This enables organizations to achieve more refined security controls that align with their unique operational requirements.
Access reviews
IAM solutions provide the ability to review user access on a periodic basis (e.g., quarterly, annually). During an access review, managers or application owners validate and explicitly re-approve or revoke stale access. This ensures access remains appropriate over time as user jobs and responsibilities change.
Audit logs
IAM solutions provide detailed logs that record user activities and events across managed systems and resources. These logs track critical information like login attempts, resource access, changes in permissions, administrator actions, and more.
Audit logs enable security monitoring by allowing analysis of user behavior to detect potential misuse or policy violations. The logs provide forensic evidence for incident investigation by revealing sequences of events leading up to a breach or cyberattack. These logs may integrate with Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and analytics tools for improved threat detection, compliance reporting, and automated alerting on anomalous activity.
Robust logging at scale is crucial for rapid tracing and remediation of unauthorized access to sensitive cloud environments and data.
Cloud IAM integrates these mechanisms to empower organizations to securely govern access to cloud apps, infrastructure, and data at scale. It enables provisioning the right access to the right identities at the right time. With robust cloud IAM in place, companies can confidently migrate critical systems and data to the cloud while maintaining compliance and security.
The Critical Importance of IAM for Cloud Security
As organizations continue adopting cloud computing, modern identity and access management solutions tailored for the cloud become critically important for several reasons:
Securing Sensitive Cloud Data and Resources
Migrating systems, applications, and data to the cloud can create huge security risks if proper access controls are not implemented. IAM provides the ability to:
- Set policies that limit which users can access specific cloud resources based on roles, groups, or other attributes.
- Enforce multi-factor authentication for administrative or privileged access.
- Integrate permissions across cloud tools to maintain consistent access controls.
- Revoke access immediately when employees leave or switch roles.
- Manage third-party and customer access via cloud directories and single sign-on.
With strong identity and access foundations in the cloud, organizations can better secure sensitive data, workloads, and resources across services like AWS, Azure, and GCP.
Preventing Exploitation of Overly Permissive Access
The dynamic nature of cloud infrastructure often leads to users accumulating excessive permissions over time. Without proper governance, this situation can create significant opportunities for the abuse or misuse of cloud resources. Some important features to consider in this context are:
- Automated access reviews to revalidate permissions.
- Analytics to detect abnormal usage or dormant accounts.
- Privileged access management to restrict admin rights.
All of these IAM mechanisms help organizations adhere to least privilege principles in the cloud. They prevent both unintentional exposure and malicious actions by users with excessive access.
Gaining Visibility into User Activity Across Cloud
The fragmented nature of cloud environments spanning multiple accounts, regions, and services makes it difficult to track user activities and resource access without a centralized layer. A robust cloud IAM provides:
- Unified visibility into access and usage across cloud accounts.
- Detailed logging of user actions on resources to enable monitoring.
- Reporting dashboards and analytics for security teams.
This provides organizations far greater insight into how cloud resources are being used and accessed with IAM in place.
Managing Access for External Parties
The cloud enables much broader collaboration with third parties like partners, vendors, contractors, and customers compared to traditional on-premises environments. Cloud IAM provides essential capabilities for secure external access:
- Cloud directories can store external identities alongside internal employees and integrate with identity providers for frictionless onboarding.
- Access policies can define granular permissions for external users based on factors like role, region, IP address etc.
- Single sign-on provides easy access to approved cloud apps without separate credentials.
- Time-limited access accounts can be provisioned for contractors with automated expiration.
- Audit logging tracks external access to resources for monitoring and compliance.
For example, an engineering team could securely collaborate with an external design firm on product specs in the cloud. IAM controls make this simple, auditable, and secure.
Adapting Access Controls to Business Dynamics
Public cloud usage can change quickly, so IAM (Identity and Access Management) must be able to adjust access in real time to keep pace with these fluctuations. The tools and processes that make this possible include:
- Automated onboarding/offboarding from cloud directories as employees join/leave.
- Programmatic API integration to update cloud permissions alongside IT systems.
- Contextual access rules that adapt based on user behavior and risk scoring.
- Cloud access security brokers that dynamically allow or deny access to resources.
By utilizing these elements, organizations can efficiently scale access management to match their current business needs without compromising security. As both the environments and users change, the IAM system ensures that the integrity and safety of cloud resources are continually upheld.
When Should You Prioritize Cloud IAM?
For most organizations, the clear answer is: the best time to implement robust cloud identity and access management is right now. As soon as you start migrating critical data, apps, or infrastructure to the cloud, IAM needs to be a top priority to secure these assets.
Don’t wait until further along in your cloud adoption journey or until after a breach to realize the importance of proper access governance. By tackling IAM early on, you can integrate it into your processes and prevent accumulation of risk. It is much harder to retroactively layer IAM onto sprawling cloud environments.
In the following section, I’ll delve into the specifics and highlight key milestones that require immediate focus for strengthening IAM. Additionally, I’ll provide practical examples and use cases for each of these key milestones:
When Migrating Sensitive Data to the Cloud
Build IAM foundations upfront when initially moving sensitive data or high-value applications into cloud-hosted environments. These crown-jewel assets need identity and access safety nets in place from day one. Once data moves to the cloud, irreversible exposure can happen quickly without governance guardrails in place upfront. Prioritize IAM or face the consequences of potential data breaches and unauthorized access.
Strict access policies, privileged access management, and immutable auditing are must-haves when shifting confidential or regulated data to the cloud. IAM prevents disaster by ensuring tight security. Below are some practical use cases that require a modern cloud IAM solution:
- Upgrading CRM systems like Salesforce to leverage integrated cloud analytics on client data necessitates access controls and auditing to meet privacy regulations.
- Moving financial records to cloud data warehouses for business intelligence requires strict data masking, encryption, and role-based access aligned to governance policies.
When Expanding Usage of Cloud Services
As your business adopts new cloud services, such as adopting a new SaaS application for the marketing team or standing up additional cloud infrastructure to support customer-facing web applications, IAM should evolve in lockstep with cloud growth. Proactively evolve IAM as cloud adoption grows to ensure consistent security and compliance. For example, as your marketing team adopts a new cloud-based CRM, extend identity and access policies to this SaaS application to enforce least privilege and log activity. Don’t allow permissions sprawl.
Below are some practical use cases that require a modern cloud IAM solution:
- As your company adopts new SaaS applications like Salesforce, NetSuite, or ServiceNow, extend single sign-on and access controls to these systems. This prevents creation of siloed identity stores and ensures continuity of governance.
- Building new serverless applications or migrating workloads to containers on AWS, Azure or GCP requires locking down associated infrastructure, APIs, and storage. Tight access controls prevent exposure of backend resources.
Failing to evolve IAM alongside cloud growth opens the door to risk.
When Launching New Customer-Facing Cloud Applications
External-facing applications create new attack surfaces vulnerable to exploitation. Closing these with context-aware access controls and robust API protection is crucial.
For instance, e-commerce sites must restrict internal access to back-end customer data in the cloud. And mobile apps need fine-grained authorization to cloud APIs to prevent breaches. IAM provides the necessary safeguards. Below are some practical use cases that require a modern cloud IAM solution:
- Customer-facing e-commerce sites built on cloud platforms require access controls to segment customer data in back-end databases and big data analytics systems from unauthorized internal access.
- Mobile apps accessing cloud-hosted APIs and microservices demand granular API gateway policies and fine-grained authorization controls to prevent data exfiltration.
When Onboarding Third Parties Like Partners and Vendors
Expanding digital initiatives involving external sharing with third parties like contractors, vendors, and business partners introduces new risks of accidental insider threats or malicious misuse. This situation requires the implementation of centralized directories, access reviews and activity logging to maintain security. Tightly controlling access by external identities is crucial for secure collaboration. Extend IAM to enable secure third-party access. Below are some practical use cases that require a modern cloud IAM solution:
- Federating partner identities into cloud directories with restricted permissions allows seamless collaboration on sales campaigns or joint marketing initiatives.
- Provisioning temporary virtual accounts for external consultants to access cloud development platforms enables short-term agility without undermining governance and security.
When Supporting M&A or Divestiture
Major business events like mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures require urgently updating identity and access to avoid catastrophic security gaps. Quickly onboarding, revoking or isolating access by users across involved business units is crucial. Further, deprovisioning identities when divesting is essential to prevent data loss. Cloud IAM enables smoothly onboarding, isolating, or deprovisioning the access during major transitions. Below are some practical use cases that require a modern cloud IAM solution:
- Acquiring a company requires quickly onboarding their cloud identities while isolating access to confidential systems pending review.
- Divesting a business unit mandates urgently revoking cloud access to avoid data loss or theft during the transition.
These key milestones I mentioned earlier are just a few examples among many other use cases or situations that necessitate a modern cloud IAM solution.
In today’s cloud-centric technology landscapes, identity and access management is not an optional nice-to-have. It is an essential must-have. Investing in IAM pays dividends by reducing risk, simplifying governance, and enabling secure growth.
The Future of Cloud IAM – What’s Coming Next?
As cloud adoption accelerates, identity and access management will continue evolving from traditional legacy approaches to modern intelligent systems tightly integrated with cloud security.
Emerging capabilities on the horizon indicate IAM is headed towards smarter, more adaptive access controls. Specifically, we will see:
- Context-aware policies factoring in diverse risk signals from devices, behavior patterns and threat intelligence feeds. This allows real time adjustment of permissions based on a user or workload’s current security context.
- Tighter coupling between IAM platforms and adjacent cloud security tools like CASBs, CWPPs and cloud infrastructure entitlement managers. Unified policy orchestration and shared signals will enable more automated, risk-appropriate responses.
- Increased standardization of access controls, entitlement schemas and APIs across different cloud vendors and platforms. This simplifies implementing consistent identity and access governance across multi-cloud environments.
In summary, the future of cloud IAM points towards more dynamic, integrated systems that enhance security through smarter contextual access controls and unified coordination with other cloud security capabilities.
As organizations continue migrating critical assets to the cloud, investing in modern adaptive IAM will only increase in priority. Companies able to harness robust identity and access management tailored for the cloud era will maintain their competitive advantage.
Continue Your Cloud IAM Journey
In this article, we covered the essentials of cloud identity and access management (IAM) – from the capabilities it provides, to why it’s critical for cloud security, to when organizations should prioritize investing in IAM.
In upcoming articles, I will delve into more specifics on planning and implementing robust cloud IAM tailored to your unique cloud environment and use cases. This will include guidance on:
- Architecting cloud IAM platforms and integrating with existing identity providers
- Deploying key access management capabilities like SSO, MFA and identity lifecycle automation
- Adopting leading practices for access governance across popular cloud providers like AWS, Azure and GCP
- Leveraging advanced features like risk-based adaptive access control and session monitoring
Stay tuned for deeper dives providing actionable steps to deploy comprehensive IAM solutions on your cloud journey. With the right guidance, you can confidently secure identities, manage access, and gain visibility across your dynamic cloud ecosystem.
