Free Talking - Episode 2

07 July, 2021, by Natasha Free

Why do businesses need good Identity & Access Management

Listen in to hear Natasha Free talk about why businesses need good Identity & Access Management:

Transcript

Questioner: On today's Free Talking, we ask "why do businesses need good identity and access management?"

Natasha: Honestly, I struggle to understand why this is still a question in 2021. And in fact, I attended an industry conference recently - they were still saying that organisations talk about security as an overhead, but, you know, these days, it's integral to doing business.

Natasha: If you look at where we are now, businesses are offering more digital services; there are new channels for going to market; everyone has been working from home; people using their own devices; and at the same time we have the shift to Cloud Services; and greater integration with third party applications and on top of that the increased regulations. So, you know, if you can't secure that then how are you going to do business?

Natasha: I suppose the thing that I've been thinking about is that we have to find different ways to frame what identity and access means for business and what security means for businesses and I think a good way to look at that is trust. So, do customers trust you? Do your partners trust you? Do the auditors trust you to get your compliance right? And there more and more ways for the bad actors (so-called bad actors) to expose your business. This is costly in terms of both money and reputational damage.

Natasha: There are plenty of examples where people won't buy from someone anymore or buy a particular piece of software if somebody has had a data breach
and equally if something goes wrong for you? Bad press! Nobody wants that. Trust is diminished.

Natasha: Why look at it as a side consideration? It's integral to what you do! Things need to be secure and from my point of view, from an operations point of view, good security means getting on with the job. You know, you want to be able to focus on the thing that you do, the thing that you sell. You know, I'm in the business so I think about this a lot but if, for example, I was an online retailer, I wouldn't want to be worrying about this kind of thing all the time. I'd want to be able to focus on my business and trust in the people, the processes, the products that I have to secure the business.

Natasha: So, I think "why do businesses need good identity and access management". They need to take a holistic approach and they need to think that about the fact that it is integral to doing what you do. If you want to open up new markets? If you need to use things digitally? If you want to be able to continue to have a remote workforce? Then all of these things need to be secured.