Regain Control of Your Identity Audit Costs
As you know, auditing is an expensive, time-consuming process, but even in lightly regulated markets, it is a business-critical task you cannot avoid.
Our new remote-work era has shined a spotlight on Identity Audits and Identity Audit Cost. These specialized, expensive audits used to be confined to highly regulated markets, such as financial services and health care, but these audits are becoming more common across a range of verticals.
In fact, the heart of these audits is IDENTITY. That is, tracking identities and permissions across all of the networks and applications your organizations uses – are now necessary for both cybersecurity and corporate regulatory compliance.
Maintaining granular control of identities and permissions has, historically, been an expensive proposition, and auditing them has involved tedious, manual, costly processes.
But what if you could start turning this cost center into a business enabler?
Why are the costs of Identity Audits so high?
While traditional financial and physical security audits are time-consuming and expensive, identity audits are even more so. For years, traditional auditing firms have relied on reassigned, overworked IT workers to perform identity audits and to transform their findings into detailed reports.
This is approach is problematic for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it stretches already thin IT resources beyond the breaking point.
This approach is also a costly one, relying on well-paid specialists on loan who are performing tasks that fall outside of their typical routines and comfort zones.
Now, are you starting to see why the cost of identity audits are so high? Would you also like to learn of some ways to bring those costs under control?
Auditing black holes
Other soft costs related to audits aren’t so easy to quantify, such as fear, worry, and doubt. Although audits are a necessary business activity, most business leaders fear the process. This is natural. It’s natural to worry about audits, since the penalties for noncompliance can be severe. It’s natural to worry about audits because they could surface a problem that creates a backlash for your business through bad press coverage, such as in the case of a major data breach.
It’s also natural to worry about audits because there are so many unknowns: What problems will auditors find? How severe will those problems be? How difficult will remediation be?
And then, post-audit, doubt can creep in, as business leaders look over the complicated identity audit results and ask themselves, “What if auditors missed a major issue that could hurt us in the future?”
When you rely on a process that is manual and at least partially ad-hoc, those fears, worries, and doubts, unfortunately, are just the cost of being audited.
How to crush the fear of identity audits, while also slashing the high costs
Competent auditing firms can walk you through the tools, methods, and quality control techniques they use to help alleviate your worries over process, but one of the unknowns – cost – is much harder for them to counter.
Another reason identity audits are so costly, a reason we haven’t touched on yet, is because they rely on manual, time-consuming, error-prone workflows. In the age of automation, this lag behind the technological times is not just a costly approach, but an increasingly risky one.
As remote work becomes more and more common, DRP auditing tools and processes must be able to scale up to meet the challenge. Unfortunately, legacy auditing techniques and tools just do not scale.
This is why startups, such as YouAttest, have emerged to fill this critical gap, hooking into your existing identity and authentication tools, automating manual, error-prone processes, and giving you back both control and predictability.
With a tool such as YouAttest’s IGA platform at the heart of your identity audit, you will not only gain visibility into the process; you will not only automate key workflows; you will not only cut costs by an order of magnitude or more, but you will also finally be able to start laying the foundation for continuous compliance.
Learn more about how to automate identity audits
If you would like to modernize your approach to identity audits, we will be discussing this very topic with industry experts later this month.
YouAttest will talk with cost-analyst expert Dustin Neal and security product analyst Josh Linder to discuss ways to lower the TCO of DRP audits, while also enjoying better results.
Join us on September 30 at 10:00 AM PST to learn:
- How to quantify the complexity of your current processes and workflows
- The sky-high risks and stark financial implications of the status quo
- Exactly what the risks are of an overlooked credential/access mistake, for both manual and automated approaches
- How to deploy audit accelerators to shorten timelines, improve accuracy, and lower costs
- The best way to justify the investment in auditing automation
- How to use the savings from your lower TCO to build a continuous compliance program
Believe it or not, there just might be gold hidden in your auditing budget. Join us on September 30, and we’ll show you how to start mining it.
