Cloud Identity and Access Management: Understanding the Chain of Access

Through 2025, customers will be at fault for 99% of cloud security failures, according to Gartner, and 90% of organizations that don't control public cloud use will share sensitive data in inappropriate ways. This should come as no surprise given the immense complexity of public cloud service offerings and the hybrid and multicloud deployments enterprises gravitate toward.

Organizations must implement cloud ownership guidelines, establish governance policies, and find a way to visualize who has access to their cloud environments to avoid financial loss and data exposure. For example, in a recent event involving a leading search engine, an unsecured server with a removed or expired password gave cybercriminals access to user search queries and location that put customers at risk for fraud. 

This article explores where enterprises encounter challenges with cloud identity and access management (IAM) and best practices they should follow to correct these mistakes.

Why You Can't Apply On-Premises IAM in the Cloud
Many enterprises wrongly assume they can use the same IAM approach for cloud and on-premises, which puts security at risk and opens opportunities for mistakes. Data in cloud environments is highly distributed, whereas data center environments are centralized and well-controlled, so the same rules can't be applied to both. Additionally, the cloud allows users to take advantage of elastic services that can scale up and down dynamically. This means cloud environments experience a rapid rate of change, and old IAM policies that may be suitable for on-premises can't keep up. Therefore, enterprises must acknowledge that they need a new set of policies specifically tailored to their cloud environment.

This is easier said than done, as 81% of organizations use a multicloud approach and public cloud providers' IAM tools typically can't expand beyond their own platform, making it difficult to implement a standardized IAM solution across all cloud platforms. 

How Users Bungle IAM Permissions
A common mistake in cloud IAM is that organizations are too liberal with their permissions, whether they intend to be or not. People in different groups (such as employees and contractors) have access to resources in the cloud and can turn on access and change permissions within cloud environments. Since decision-making is dispersed and owned by people who don't always have the background information needed to make informed access decisions, it's easy to unknowingly grant access to users or resources that should never have been given access in the first place. Since cloud environments are extensive and complex, visibility of which users have access to data becomes increasingly difficult. This lack of visibility can also make enterprises unaware of expired/removed passwords that compromise resources.

Consequences of Failing to Protect Privileged Users and Machines
Stolen or compromised credentials and cloud misconfigurations were the most common causes of a breach for companies in 2019, representing nearly 40% of malicious incidents. In these instances, unauthorized users take advantage of weak IAM policies to gain access to sensitive resources and data. The resulting breach typically costs companies an average of $3.86 million — and it doesn't stop there. Breaches also result in damaged reputation and loss of customer trust, which significantly affects a company's value.   

Best Practices
To avoid breaches and keep data secure, organizations must create IAM governance policies specifically for their cloud environments — and they must be able to enforce these policies. Best practices for cloud IAM governance include:

The Future
Through 2024, Gartner predicts, most enterprises will continue to struggle to measure cloud security risks. However, this shouldn't deter organizations from using the cloud to power their workloads and improve efficiency and productivity. Enterprises must have a cloud governance strategy to evaluate risk vs. reward to make informed decisions. By implementing governance and IAM policies for people and machines while improving cloud visibility, enterprises can ensure data stays secure, only authorized users have access to sensitive data, and the blast radius is minimized if a mistake happens.