Uncontested Lay Up

Last week talked about the basics of how you can address the risk of insider attacks from former employees. A recent study of IT managers and network administrators conducted by Amplitude Research on behalf of VanDyke Software, shows a growing concern about insider threats, particularly unauthorized access by current and former employees. Unauthorized access by current and former employees was cited by 11% of the survey respondents, as a reason cited network intrusions, the 4th most frequent response. Using an Active Directory bridge product like PowerBroker Identity Services for seamless integration of Linux, UNIX, and Mac OS X with Microsoft Active Directory allows you to cut off privileged access to key systems by deactivating AD accounts when an employee leaves the company. As close to a slam dunk as it gets in enterprise IT security. This week I did a webcast with our friends at Symplified on cloud security. We talked about the many complexities and challenges of security in the cloud, but they also provide a simple to implement solution to another challenge with former employees – access to SAAS applications. Symplified allows you to link your or other user stores like LDAP to provide single sign on and making de-provisioning of former employees from those apps part of your normal account deactivation procedure. Not quite slam dunk, but an uncontested layup.