Insurance companies need authorization – here’s why

Emme Reichert   ·   Thursday, August 3rd, 2023

Even though the insurance industry is a part of the highly regulated financial sector, they are increasingly being targeted by cybercriminals.

It’s not hard to see why they’re such an attractive target.

According to a recent report, insurance companies store a vast amount of personal Identifiable Information (PII) in outdated systems and they lack user training.

Plus, they were slow to adopt a strong authentication strategy which led to nearly half (47%) of all breaches in the financial services sector affecting the insurance industry in 2022.

This begs the question: How can insurance companies deter hackers and other bad actors and reduce risk?

A critical element in the answer is to implement a policy-based access solution as part of a more modern approach to access control.

In fact, as we speak with customers across the globe, we see insurance companies implement authorization solutions to protect customers’ privacy and information through access control.

Here are a couple of ways authorization reduces risk for insurance companies:

Remove the burden of access policies in agile development and deployment

Authorization can be integrated into the continuous integration and continuous delivery/continuous deployment (CI/CD) journey across all agile release trains.

When working on trains to add features into applications, authorization must be considered, as implementing access policies can be an afterthought for developers.

However, in the case of custom applications, it can be hard to implement authorization.

You will likely have to go into the code to change the policies. Any code changes require regression and QA testing which can be quite time consuming.

Relying on an external authorization tool means policy updates are integrated into the application without any code changes. This removes the burden on developers, limits testing requirements and ensures the application remains secure.

Use Zero Trust to protect assets

Traditional perimeter security is no longer sufficient to protect assets. It has outpaced the legacy security principles and architecture still in place in many agencies.

This is a really bad place to be in terms of security.

Attribute-based access control (ABAC) as part of a Zero Trust strategy enables dynamic access to resources based on multiple attributes. This can include the user, the device, location, behavior risk score, and so on.

The policies that allow this can adjust access permissions dynamically.

For example, it can be the right user, right device, but perhaps the user is not in the office so the policy enables access but with anonymized data.

In this scenario, the employee can still do their job, but the data is still protected. Therefore, ABAC allows for a real-time response to changes in the trust level or to any threats detected.

But wait..there’s more! Download our fact sheet

Read our fact sheet details the four ways insurance companies can leverage authorization as a critical part of your access control strategy.

Then, request a demo with one of our solution experts to see our authorization solution in action.