Many organizations are struggling today between the following best of both worlds:
- keeping the access to their corporate data as a simple as possible with the least amount of effort with regards to login prompts and manual user entries
- Keeping the corporate data as secure as possible with a strong set of security policies and additional layers of defense.
Both statements are lined up against each other, in traditional IT landscapes we might face a serious challenge in providing best of both. However since organizations are shifting their estate to a modern setup, Azure Active Directory can play a significant role in providing single-sign on and enforcing a secure policy framework for your authentication process.
If you look at the defense in depth strategy, securing the Identity & Access layer is your second line of defense to protect your corporate data from any malicious activity. Preventing a breach as far away from your corporate data is why this should matter to you.
Rewind
Many of you can probably familiarize with the following statements:
- Working remotely used to be a big burden because of VPN connections that had to be set-up (and let's be honest 7 out of 10 you experienced issues when trying to connect)
- Hardware tokens had to be provided to your employees to provide multi-factor authentication, these could easily be lost or didn't work on first time use.
- IT Staff was tasked to spend their time on registering new tokens (hard and soft) into a central management console
- Additional investments had to be made in order to obtain a new set of tokens
- Security providers where often switched over the years, and a new learning curve had to be made because of the differences in administration
Throughout the years, many improvements have been made, and Microsoft has built a strong foundation to translate these challenges into business opportunities.
Thanks to the Identity suite provided by Microsoft we are now able to provide this layer of Identity and Access, faster and on a larger scale without additional capital investments.
Our goal
Providing a user-friendly and secure authentication process to all our applications with the least amount of administrative effort.
Road to a successful Identity & Access framework
1. Assess your current Identity & Access Framework
- How are we authenticating to our corporate data
- How are we authenticating to our corporate applications
- Which layers of defense are active in order to secure the following
- Identity (who I am and represent within my organization)
- Application (who can access our applications, internal / external users, what are they allowed to do, are we enforcing additional constraints?)
- Data (who and what can access our corporate data, internal / external users, what are they allowed to do, are we enforcing additional constraints?)
2. Extend your traditional Identity setup with a Hybrid Identity together with Azure Active Directory or start Cloud Native with a Cloud-Only identity based on Azure Active Directory
3. Provide Single-Sign On based on Azure Active Directory to your LOB applications
4. Secure your application and corporate data by enabling Azure AD Multi-Factor Authentication
Ok great, so no capital investment into a security product anymore?
Correct, because we are leveraging the security features provide by Azure Active Directory and Azure Active Directory Premium P1 we are acquiring our security on a monthly per user basis.
And what's even better, you are probably already paying for it but not using it at it's fullest.
Get in touch with one of our ASPEX team members in order to fully utilize and optimize your current Identity and Access set-up. Let us walk you through the required steps to enhance your secure score report. Secure Score provides you with a detailed report of your current security exposure, benchmarks and KPI's are based on information gathered by and reviewed by Microsoft.
As ASPEX we provide an added value by bringing additional insights, logic and optimizations based on field best practices.
The following licenses provide eligibility to utilize Azure Active Directory and Azure Active Directory Premium P1:
- Azure Active Directory Premium P1 (Add-on)
- Microsoft 365 Business
- Microsoft 365 Enterprise E3
- Microsoft 365 Enterprise E5
- Enterprise + Mobility and Security E3
- Enterprise + Mobility and Security E5
Next steps
Get started with your modern identity and access journey together with ASPEX and let us strive towards a 100 % secure score ranking.
