Nothing is more important than conducting proper audits to ensure an organization’s data security and compliance. However, conducting effective audits is easier said than done for many organizations. This brings us to the audit problem of Siloed Applications.
Many businesses still rely on siloed applications to store and manage their data. This can make auditing a challenge, as different applications typically have unique security protocols and access controls. Businesses can comprehensively view their operations across all applications by consolidating data into a single platform with a proper auditing tool.
What are siloed applications?
Most enterprises have a directory that holds their identities for applications, networks, data, and other resources. This directory is the recommended IT security practice to create an enterprise source of record that holds groups, roles, and permissions for the enterprise. It makes it easier for enterprises to determine authorization, usually per the groups defined in this data store. This practice is the recommended configuration for auditing because all governance is in a single store. It makes it simple for auditors to show logical groups and all document changes for groups in a single data store view.
However, this is not typical as many organizations rely on disparate resources without a centralized data store. This makes it challenging to keep track of what they need to access the services required. With many compliance measures like HIPAA, SOC, or PDI-DSS requiring users to have the least amount of privileges for their role, it can be challenging to maintain without a complete picture of the resources they may be permissioned in. Same for the CMMA, which requires user actions to be tracked at the individual level, but if there is no visibility into the number of resources they may have different access permissions to, this can be nearly impossible to maintain.
We often see companies with multiple data sources but no cohesive view because they use these independent platforms instead of having one central location where everything would be seamlessly stored together. These separated applications make accessing information like AD, Azure AD, Okta, LDAP, or whatever the enterprise uses as the primary credential store complex. Because they aren’t a single identity across different platforms or environments, handling multiple identity credentials becomes more challenging to manage and is referred to as “siloed” applications or “siloed” resources.
Solutions – Audit Problem of Siloed Applications
Siloed applications are a growing concern in the enterprise IT world, making it difficult to access information across several platforms because multiple credentials need to be managed for a single user. In addition, there is the governance issue of proving to the auditors that the users in their stores map to the same roles, permissions and groupings in the identity store of record.
Image #1: YouAttest has created a cloud-based solution to solve the identity audits of siloed applications.
We face audit problems of siloed applications because, most often, the groups and roles do NOT exist in the stand-alone identity stores. Thus it’s tough to show the auditors why users in a resource are given access. This is even harder when changes are made, and you need to justify those changes during your governance audit. Enterprises often use spreadsheets or manually map groups on an enterprise identity store to be tracked over time. However, this is not only tedious but also prone to error if done incorrectly.
This is precisely what the YouAttest SAAS solution does. It solves the audit problem of siloed applications by first importing the identity directory of record – with all the identities, groups, roles and permissions. YouAttest then has facilities to input all the individual applications to the resource and thus allowing the enterprise to map the siloed identities to the groupings in the identity store of record. YouAttest executes this importing without expensive connectors and expensive deployments.
YouAttest focuses on building a cloud-based solution for siloed applications, ensuring companies don’t need to worry about manually managing identity access. YouAttest’s auditing suite helps to save time and resources and improves efficiency by removing most of the manual processes of collating and nagging out of the audit.
If you want to learn more about how to resolve audit problems for siloed applications, then don’t wait anymore. Register now to attend our upcoming webinar on January 12.
If you have questions or would like to learn more about the solutions YouAttest provides, contact us at sales@youattest.com or 877-452-0496, and we will address your identity audits for security and compliance.
—
YouAttest is an automated identity audit tool for your identity and access control resources. GRC Experts Stacey Cameron and Shannon Noonan from QoS Consulting Solutions will join YouAttest on Wed, Jan 12th for webinar: “SOX and Other Identity Audits and Siloed Applications”
