Data & Access Management - Essay Example

Data Access and Management Data Access and Management Introduction Data security management has attracted a lot of deliberation atthe macro level. The common topics are virtualization, data slicing and concerns circumventing the public versus public clouds. Presently, firewalls and security the results from data management is also an essential aspect of such discussion. A firewall has traditionally been employed in the provision of a distinguished obstacle that has never been breached. The data access and management has been on the rise to answer the typical questions raised when the breaches happen. Such questions concern to uncover the people access the information either from external or leak from the inside. How should the company react, if all? How can the company increase Information Technology transparency? The only problem about the question is that they are reactive and not proactive and therefore never curb the breach. Therefore, data access and management as presently constitute digs deep into asking questions as, what transpires inside a company’s firewall, and especially the connection between identity access management (IAM) and data security. Body Inside The Firewall The identity of a company users and the respective users’ scope permission followers immediately after the company starts to raise questions about whatever transpires inside the firewall. It is a common phenomenon to find inappropriate resource access permission in a number of the organization. The worse, however, is the lack of counteractive measures to thwart misuse. The reason is that employees are already trusted. Therefore, the employee has the access to the data centers and other assets inside the firewall. The majority of threats to data access and management, therefore, arise the notion of trusting everyone on the inside. Consequently, the organization suffers severely as a single misuse mistake may culminate into leaked intellectual property, lawsuits, regulatory probing, fines as well as audit failures. Therefore, the sole solution is to control the identity access through a systematic management despite being a complex task. Internal Stakeholders in IAM The IAM is the high stake and therefore balancing act between senior management, IT, and Legal stakeholders. The management must understand that IT has implemented and is imposing rigorous IAM systems and protocols. The measures must integrate the stratification of privileges amongst the users and checks and balances on the approach IT itself uses passwords. Access Governance Data access and management requires an effective framework that answers the question aforementioned. The Information Technology administrators make their department transparent but concurrently require necessary techniques to identify and revamp as well as securing their noted systems weaknesses. The individual-level security has to be created circumventing sensitive information to prevent exposure to uncalled abuse and risks. The standard risk and threats to data access and management include unsecured files and folders, over-privileged users, weak local computer policies, passwords that don not expire, and improper group membership. More importantly, the IT has to ensure that colleagues are leaving the organization ceases from accessing the organizational materials. The effectiveness of access management rests on the professional password management. The management of access to sensitive accounts becomes even more challenging for IT experts themselves. Terrible question must be answered such as who truly require the keys to the castle? And at what time do too many keys rated a security threat? Such questions are left unanswered in many organizations. Therefore, a simple password is never effective further stressing the importance of the issues raised. Therefore, an effective data access and management team must always find answers to these complex questions. The present context of cloud computing further complicates the manner in which such issue are addressed. The result is that IT manager incompletely have control over the data outside held by third-party cloud providers despite their firewall staff tireless efforts to manage. Indeed, cloud computing reveals devastating disconnects between the IT and management. Compliance with Government Regulation IAM based on appropriate frameworks is a mandatory equipment to business in the eye of government regulations with respect to managing privileged accounts. For instance, the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act introduced the benchmarks for publicly traded U.S companies’ boards and management alongside public accounting organizations. The Act, therefore, advocates stringent IAM control since the financial information of publicly traded companies rests on their individual servers. The risks attached to inaccurate financial statements due to unscrupulous password-permitted party changing the figures can only be counteracted by practical implementation of stringent controls. Such controls are also inevitabilities to minimize the misuse of financial records. However, such implementations are never a single time-slot in the eye of the IT staff. The IT staff must at all-time be certain that that its control is efficient and appropriate. The effectiveness of the control instigates from effective inspection, documentation and subsequent access control repair for the unquestionable degree of compliance. Therefore, the government regulation primarily push network administrators and management to possess tools appropriate to implement, maintain and report on access controls across the entire range of computer systems and data stores in the organization. Identity to Data Security IAM is solely never the consideration in data security. IAM is an essential component of the firewall as an individual customarily worries about the external risks to the organization. The chief area of concern in the Identity Access Management is the issue circumventing passwords. However, those outside the IT wanders less about IAM’s password concerns leave alone having a grasp of what IAM entails. Such a myopic threats must halt immediately for efficient data access and management. The Information Access Management is not only a crucial and integral part of IT but also business function. Threats of Ineffective IAM The organization will gradually lose its intellectual property The firm will always feature in the news coverages for significant breaches from without and leaks from within The organization will be tagged non-compliant with federal and state regulatory data security requirement. Identity Manager Data Governance Edition safeguards the Company by permitting access control to the business owner away from the IT staff. Only the owners of the business can selectively permit access to sensitive data. With the Identity Manager restricted access functionality, an individual firm outlines its access policy. Moreover, the single firm has the authority to analyze, approve and fulfill unstructured data access request to file, folders, as well as share across NTFS and NAS devices and SharePoint. Such provisions ensure that sensitive and unstructured data is solely accessible to authorized users. Furthermore, an Identity Manager automates the request-and-approvals workflow permitting security thus lessening the workload amongst the IT staff. Beneficial Features of Identity Manager There is a personalized dashboard that warrants the user to view trends, past, and present data access activity, as well as status on the personalized dashboard. Such provisions permit the generation of compliance reports from the data. In addition, there is a simplified auditing that avails the chief information for audit preparations permitting the user to recognize user access to business resources like files, folders and shares on NAS devices, NTFS, and SharePoint. Access verification is also permitted in Identity Manager allowing the system to monitor user and resource activity as well as configure and schedule a recertification procedure for data owners to verify and attest to employee access hence ensuring that solely authorized users access particular materials. In addition, restricted access to organization unstructured and sensitive data is guaranteed and only reachable by authorized users by warranting one to define access policies. Such locks down sensitive data files, folders and then sharing across NAS devices, NTFS, and SharePoint. Data owner assignment also is catered for culminating into the easy evaluation of usage trends and read as well as write access to assist user in determining and assigning the necessary owner of data for all future access request. Responses to Threats Digital technologies and investments in cyber and information infrastructure have greatly alter how science is executed. Such alteration have been felt in the National Science Foundation’s Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery. The alterations touch such process as converging advances in networking and visualization. In addition, such places as data systems, software and collaboration platforms have also greatly attracted alterations with respect to the accomplishment of research and education. Scientific data is also critical to this transformation. The reports by National Academies depicts the escalated requirement to ensure an environment that is enabling to warrant the US to accomplish the global problems of the 21st century. Automatically, researchers, students, members of the public and scientists has to be empowered. The empowerment may be achieved through a full array of information resources integrating the available scientific data to improve inventions and advance research, science and education. Ultimately, a number of federal agencies have considered and implemented data policies. For instance, NSF declared in 2010 to change its data sharing policy to acquire data management plans (DMP). Further, the Association of Research Libraries has established such guide primarily for librarians to assist them comply with the present NSF standards. Conclusion To sum up, data access and management is central to the current cloud computing. Therefore, all the stakeholders must struggle to safeguard their respective organizational data. Reference Ferrari, E. (2010). Access control in data management systems. San Rafael, calif.: Morgan & Claypool. Read More