Alleviating IAM technical debt through policy-driven authorization

Technical debt can severely hinder the agility of an identity and access management (IAM) team and compromise the effectiveness of organizational security controls. Security and risk management professionals must contend with siloed tools, legacy integrations, incomplete discovery, poor IAM hygiene, and complex onboarding (and offboarding) processes. Among the myriad of solutions, policy-driven authorization stands out as a promising approach to help mitigate IAM debt.

The burden of IAM debt

IAM technical debt accumulates in organizations as a side effect of siloed IAM tools, suboptimal IAM processes, and poor quality of IAM data. This risk weakens the agility of the IAM team and the effectiveness of organizational security controls. As identity-first security becomes a top priority, security and risk management professionals face an escalating challenge of managing this debt, which impacts security.

Understanding policy-driven authorization

Policy-driven authorization is a framework that centralizes and standardizes access control policies across an organization. Instead of hardcoding authorization logic within individual applications, policies are defined centrally and enforced locally or centrally depending on the need.

This approach offers several benefits:

1. Consistency: Ensures that access control rules are applied consistently across all systems and applications.
2. Scalability: Allows for scalable management of access controls as policies can be updated centrally without modifying individual applications.
3. Flexibility: Provides the ability to adapt to changing regulatory requirements and organizational needs without significant reengineering.
4. Transparency: Eases audits and access reviews by making them the process swifter and more reflective of reality.

Alleviating IAM debt with policy-driven authorization

Technical debt can hinder the agility of an IAM team and compromise security controls. If left unchecked, IAM technical debt will continue to increase. There is no better illustration than role explosion: companies have gone from a handful of business roles to thousands across dozens of applications. Seeing a 10x role to employee ratio is not unheard of. Policy-driven authorization offers a solution to help reduce IAM debt by centralizing and standardizing access control policies.

1. Siloed IAM tools

• Improving visibility: Policy-driven authorization centralizes access control, improving visibility and coordination across the organization. This enhanced observability allows for more effective monitoring and management of identities, reducing the accumulation of IAM debt.
• Integration with IAM tools: Policy-driven authorization can work with other IAM tools such as identity governance and administration (IGA). While IGAs are good, they are not enough. Authorization solutions close risk gaps that regular access management solutions might miss, as they operate in real-time based on attributes to provide the necessary context.
• Standards-based integration: Axiomatics is working on standards-based integration through its collaboration with the OpenID AuthZEN Working Group.
• Centralized and decentralized security strategy: A centralized/decentralized security strategy is now required to meet security, hybrid, multicloud, and geopolitical requirements. Policy-driven authorization meets this need by being a centralized tool with features like policy authoring, versioning, policy translation, and orchestration. It decentralizes policy enforcement using policy orchestration and configurations from the central system.

2. Nonstandard and legacy enterprise applications and services

• Decoupling access control: Policy-driven authorization decouples access control logic from individual applications, enabling consistent and scalable management across diverse systems. This simplifies the integration of legacy systems and reduces technical debt.
• Modernizing applications and services: The need to modernize applications, services, and APIs can be driven by security requirements or the raw need for better IAM flexibility and controls that modern IAM tools provide. Although this is a big and complex undertaking, organizations need to establish a long-term migration strategy for their legacy applications. Policy-driven authorization helps in this process by working with legacy systems and APIs.

3. Incomplete discovery processes

• Comprehensive discovery and management: Policy-driven authorization enforces consistent access control policies across all identities, including machine identities, ensuring comprehensive discovery and management. This results in improved security posture and compliance.
• Improved observability: Policy-driven authorization helps improve observability as access control is managed centrally. It also extends to capture all entitlements in applications and systems.
• Continuous, comprehensive, and contextual: To ensure continuous, comprehensive and contextual discovery, organizations should follow best practices for policy-driven authorization.

4. Poor IAM hygiene

• Enforcing consistent access control: Policy-driven authorization enforces consistent access control policies, ensuring that all identities are managed according to best practices. This results in improved IAM hygiene and a stronger security posture.
• Improving access governance: By finding and remediating issues with accounts and entitlements, policy-driven authorization enhances access governance and privileged access, contributing to better IAM hygiene.
• Achieving higher IAM maturity: Higher levels of IAM maturity can only be obtained by leveraging both administrative and runtime controls. For example, when a network administrator performs atypical and high-risk activities, such as deleting or downloading sensitive customer data, the user’s privileges may be put on hold until a manual review is completed. Runtime analytics then triggers a workflow that prompts the user’s manager to review access logs and permissions.
• Implementing ABAC principles: While most IAM teams apply role-based access control (RBAC) principles to grant access, attribute-based access control (ABAC) goes beyond roles by considering other attributes in real-time.

5. Complex enrolment procedures

• Streamlining onboarding: Policy-driven authorization streamlines onboarding processes by decoupling access control logic from individual applications. This simplification enables smoother onboarding and more efficient integration reducing technical debt.
• Providing specific guidance and tooling support: When stakeholders lack specific guidance and tooling support, they often create their own new, siloed IAM processes. This makes it very hard for IAM teams to manage, often adding to the technical debt.
• Moving to just-in-time access: Moving to just-in-time access for all greenfield applications is essential. It is also crucial to accept the usage of multiple secrets management tools in a hybrid and multicloud environment.
• Focus on centralized governance: Centralized governance and control, along with decentralized storage and issuance of credentials, should be a primary focus. Central externalized authorization managers can push down policies to services as they are managed centrally.

Other advantages of policy-driven authorization

There are several additional advantages that make this approach an invaluable component of modern IAM strategies. By centralizing and standardizing access control policies, organizations can achieve a range of operational efficiencies and security enhancements.

1. Centralized policy management: Centralizing policy management simplifies the administration of access control rules. Instead of managing policies in a fragmented manner across multiple systems, administrators can define and update policies from a single control point. This reduces the risk of inconsistencies and ensures uniform enforcement of access controls.
2. Real-time adaptability: With policy-driven authorization, organizations can quickly adapt to changing regulatory requirements or evolving business needs. Policies can be modified in real-time and applied across the entire IT ecosystem without requiring code changes in individual applications. This agility helps organizations stay compliant and responsive to emerging threats.
3. Comprehensive auditing and reporting: Policy-driven authorization frameworks often come with built-in auditing and reporting capabilities. These features provide detailed insights into access control decisions, helping organizations monitor compliance, identify potential security gaps, and demonstrate due diligence during audits.
4. Reduced development overhead: By externalizing access control logic, development teams can focus on building core application functionality without worrying about implementing complex authorization mechanisms. This separation of concerns reduces development overhead, accelerates time-to-market, and lowers the likelihood of security vulnerabilities due to flawed access control implementations.

Conclusion

Policy-driven authorization offers a robust solution for helping alleviate technical IAM debt by enhancing observability and improving IAM hygiene.

As organizations prioritize identity-first security, adopting a policy-driven approach to authorization can reduce technical debt and strengthen overall security controls. Embracing this strategy not only addresses current IAM challenges, but also lays a solid foundation for future security innovations and resilience.