What is Identity and Access Management?

Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a security framework that maintains and controls an organization's digital identities as well as access to information and resources. IAM refers to the rules, methods, and technology that are in place to guarantee that only authorized persons have access to the usage of a company's digital resources. Controlling user access to resources is accomplished through the administration of user privileges, roles, and permissions. This guarantees that only authorized personnel have access to sensitive data and that they only have access to the specific information required for their job.

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Why does IAM play an important role in enterprise audits?

Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a critical component of corporate auditing because it ensures the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of an organization's digital resources. An enterprise audit like ISO and SOC often entails a detailed assessment of an organization's operations, procedures, systems, and financial records to evaluate if they conform to internal rules, industry standards, and legal requirements. IAM is critical to ensuring compliance in these areas.

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IAM is crucial to enterprise audits because it provides a framework for managing user identities and access to resources, helping organizations comply with regulatory requirements, manage risks, and provide detailed audit logs and trials.

IAM can guarantee that only authorized personnel have access to sensitive information and resources during an enterprise audit. This can aid in the prevention of illegal access, data breaches, and other security incidents that could harm an organization's brand.

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How does Unosecur help with enterprise audits?

Unosecur is a cloud security platform that enables enterprises to address difficult IAM-related challenges at a scale in under 15 minutes. We help organizations scale their identity permissions accurately based on user activity. 

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When it comes to ISO and SOC audit there will be several questions focussing on IAM. For example, how many users do you have in your organization? And how many are machine identities? Unosecur’s centralized dashboard provides detailed information about users and their privileges. 

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You may come across the following general questions or scenarios during your audit:

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How are you managing third-party vendor/ freelancer access in your cloud account? 

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With Unosecur’s  Entitlement Management Controls (EM Controls) JIT feature, you can provide access to your vendors for a specific time period. The policy will expire after the specified time period, thus effectively removing all access.

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How are you remediating user privilege by following the principle of least privilege?

Unosecur’s EM Controls JEP feature helps remediate identity privilege based on a user’s activity for a time period of 15, 30, 60, or 90 days. 

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Can you check activity for a particular AWS region? 

Unosecur’s NLP (Natural Language Processing) querying will assist you in understanding "who did what, when, and where on your account level" by simplifying your queries. Thus, you’ll be able to monitor the activity for a particular AWS region using this feature.

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How do you identify excessive privilege for your identity?

Our IAM Analyzer is a powerful functionality that allows you to make smarter decisions based on an identity’s(user+role) Granted, Executed, Excessive, and High-risk privileges. It also prescribes you with the right-sized remedial IAM policy.

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What are the controls that have been deployed for monitoring and assessing risks for your identity?

Based on CVSS 3.0, Unosecur report will provide you with a detailed analysis of your identity privilege risks.

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Unosecur addresses the following topics to help you simplify your enterprise audit:

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• Determine who has administrative privileges and members who are not actively using the provided access. 
• The number of delete operations that were carried out on your account.
• The actions that were carried out based on the users’ activity.
• The list of used and unused services.
• Effective querying of your account activities.

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We hope the above article has helped you understand how Unosecur can assist in preparing for Audits. Want to learn more about us? Get a demo here and learn more about Unosecur. Happy auditing!

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