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What is Access Control? What are the Key Considerations?

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Category: Cybersecurity PRISM
To effectively protect your data, your organization’s access control policy must address these (and other) questions:
  1. Who should access your company’s data?
  2. How do you make sure those who attempt access have actually been granted that access?
  3. Under which circumstances do you deny access to a user with access privileges?
 
 

What is Access Control?

Access control is a method of guaranteeing that users are who they say they are and that they have the appropriate access to company data.
At a high level, access control is a selective restriction of access to data. It consists of two main components: authentication and authorization.
 
Authentication is a technique used to verify that someone is who they claim to be. Authentication isn’t sufficient by itself to protect data. What’s needed is an additional layer, authorization, which determines whether a user should be allowed to access the data or make the transaction they’re attempting.
Without authentication and authorization, there is no data security.
 
In every data breach, access controls are among the first policies which are investigated. Whether it be the inadvertent exposure of sensitive data improperly secured by an end user or some breach, where sensitive data was exposed through a public-facing web server operating with a software vulnerability, your access controls are a key component of information security architecture. When your access controls are not properly implemented or maintained, the result can be catastrophic for your organization.
 
Any organization whose employees connect to the internet—in other words, every organization today—needs some level of access control in place. That’s especially true of businesses with employees who work out of the office and require access to the company data resources and services.
 
In my recent postings, I have already pointed out that effective Role Based Access Controls are absolute must for you. However, these must be supplemented with Rule-based access controls.
  • Role-based access depends heavily on users being logged into a particular network or application so that their credentials can be verified.
  • Rule-based access may be applied to more broad and overreaching scenarios, such as allowing all traffic from specific IP addresses or during specific hours rather than simply from specific user groups.
👉👉👉 Access control rules provide a granular method of handling network traffic.
 

SOME KEY CONSIDERATIONS:

  1. Access control requires the enforcement of persistent policies in a dynamic world without traditional borders. Most of us work in hybrid environments where data moves from on-premises servers or the cloud to offices, homes, hotels, cars and coffee shops with open wi-fi hot spots, which can make enforcing access control difficult.
  2. Adding to the risk is that access is available to an increasingly large range of devices, including PCs, laptops, smart phones, tablets, smart speakers and other internet of things (IoT) devices. That diversity of devices makes it a real challenge to create and secure persistency in access policies.
  3. In the past, access control methodologies were often static. Today, network access must be dynamic and fluid, supporting identity and application-based use cases.
  4. A sophisticated access control policy can be adapted dynamically to respond to evolving risk factors, enabling a company that’s been breached to isolate the relevant employees and data resources to minimize the damage.
  5. You must assure that your access control technologies are supported consistently through your cloud assets and applications, and that they can be smoothly migrated into virtual environments such as private clouds.
  6. Access control rules must change based on risk factor, which means that your organization must deploy security analytics layers using AI and machine learning that sit on top of the existing network and security configuration. You also need to identify threats in real-time and automate the access control rules accordingly.

 

This Article Was Written & published by Meena R,  Senior Manager - IT, at Luminis Consulting Services Pvt. Ltd, India. 

Over the past 16 years, Meena has built a following of IT professionals, particularly in Cybersecurity, Cisco Technologies, and Networking...

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