Enforced security and compliance with Cloud Identity Management

Cloud identity management is the result of the explosive growth in connectivity as cloud solutions keep evolving at fast-forward speeds. Think about the way cloud shaped the business just in the last couple of years. Enterprises, in particular, have gone from seeing the cloud as an interesting experiment to embracing it as a mainstream enterprise IT resource.

Beyond increased development productivity, reduced IT administration costs and business agility, cloud identity management brings major benefits such as enforced security and compliance.

One of the pitfalls of security when connecting to an application is that implementing your own authentication mechanism can leave narrow gaps. Those gaps are what the hackers exploit in order to take advantage and information from your connectivity.

Here are a few identity management solutions built with the “modern” security attacks in mind:

• Amazon Cognito offers mobile identity management, AWS authentication and data synchronization across devices. Their solutions ensure storing and syncing in the Amazon Cognito sync store, and then across devices to make user experience consistent. Also, the service includes optional offline working, a way to manage unique identities, safeguarded AWS credentials and control access to AWS Resources
• Microsoft Cloud Azure Active Directory is one product that can secure user identity across multiple devices. Among the benefits, it provides single sign-on to any cloud and on-premises web apps and enhanced application access security using rule-based Azure Multi-Factor authentication for both on-premises and cloud application. The solution also gives you the chance to delegate important tasks such as resetting passwords and the creation and management of groups to your employees. Therefore, providing self-service verification steps can reduce helpdesk calls and enhance security.
• IBM, based on their Security Framework principles, offers identity management solutions that can help ensure secure, optimized and regulatory-compliant operations. Their solutions deliver user administration and management, resource protection and audit-reporting capabilities to help reduce the risks of security breaches and non-compliance.

Cloud identity management has already become a game changer in many organizations running millions of transactions occurring online every day. What is supposed to be the future of secured global connectivity without boundaries is here to stay, and for those willing to move their focus from operations to business agility, now is the time to stop managing the IT infrastructure and run the business.  

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