Identity Governance Blog

What Is Entitlement Management? Solutions for Modern Businesses

Understand entitlement management with Omada’s cutting-edge solutions. Explore software and systems designed for cloud and identity access management.

By Stephen Lowing, VP Marketing at Omada

What is Entitlement Management?

Entitlement management is a critical component of every organization’s identity access management (IAM) strategy.

Entitlement management is a critical component of every organization’s identity access management (IAM) strategy. Effective entitlement management ensures an organization can properly control and monitor users’ access to sensitive resources and mitigate the threat of data breaches. As organizations migrate their software and data to multi-cloud environments, IT security teams must implement secure entitlement management systems in both cloud and on-premises environments to reduce attack surfaces and modernize their security solutions. Compliance officers require cloud infrastructure entitlement management software that drives compliance across various standards, ensures adherence to international and local regulations, and accurately manages document entitlements for audit readiness. CIOs and CISOs must identify and acquire identity entitlement and access management tools that enhance security frameworks with advanced entitlement management solutions. The cloud entitlement management system they choose must integrate seamlessly with existing infrastructure to create a robust security system that hardens organizational resilience against data breaches and insider threats and mitigates security risk. Credential entitlement management plays a critical role in modern cybersecurity and compliance frameworks.

 

Key Components of Entitlement Management

Implementing the key components of entitlement management is essential for effectively controlling and monitoring access to resources within an organization. The main components are:

  1. Identity and Access Management (IAM). This includes user identification and authentication functionality that ensures users are who they claim to be through mechanisms like passwords, biometrics, or multi-factor authentication (MFA).
  2. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). RBAC establishes roles within the organization based on job functions. It assigns specific permissions to roles and simplifies user access management.
  3. Policy Management. This component defines rules and conditions under which the system grants or denies access privileges. Policies may adapt based on contextual factors such as time, location, or device.
  4. User Provisioning and De-Provisioning. The automated provisioning that a modern entitlement management system provides automatically grants user access rights based on their roles and job functions when they join the organization or change roles. Automated de-provisioning helps enforce the principle of least privilege by automatically revoking access rights when users leave the organization or no longer need certain privileges.
  5. Auditing and Reporting. This aspect of entitlement management records user activities, access requests, and changes to access rights. It also generates reports that demonstrate compliance with internal policies and external regulations.
  6. Self-Service Access Requests. Through a user request portal, users have a platform from which they may request access to resources as needed. This platform also supports automated workflows for managing and approving access requests that frequently involve multiple levels of approval.
  7. Access Certification. Periodic reviews certify that users’ access rights align with their current roles. Scheduled audits run compliance Checks that ensure ongoing adherence to policies and regulatory requirements.

These components work together to streamline permissions and access rights, maintain security and compliance, and ensure users only have access to resources necessary to do their work.

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management

Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) addresses the unique challenges of managing access in complex, dynamic cloud environments. Entitlement management on a cloud platform requires more robust technology than legacy systems can provide in an efficient, cost-effective manner.

In addition to access control, policy enforcement, and continuous real-time monitoring, effective CIEM provides visibility and discovery of cloud identities and includes permission mapping and a comprehensive inventory of all cloud resources, services, and accounts across multiple cloud platforms. It also enhances automated provisioning and de-provisioning with identity lifecycle management and just-in-time access functionality that grants temporary access to resources when needed and automatically revokes it afterward. CIEM frequently uses analytics and machine learning for detecting and remediating potential security threats and access violations.

For organizations managing cloud environments, CIEM streamlines access management processes making it easier to maintain audit logs and meet regulatory requirements, and likewise reduces the attack surface. Through a centralized approach, the Omada Identity Cloud facilitates permissions management across cloud environments that are always changing and integrates with major cloud providers to manage and monitor access permissions directly within these environments.

Identity and Credential Entitlement Management

The intersection of credential management and entitlement controls lies in their combined role in securing access to resources within an organization. While credential management focuses on the authentication of users and the security of their credentials, entitlement controls concentrate on defining and enforcing what authenticated users can access and what actions they can perform. Here is how these two areas intersect:

  1. Authentication. Authentication verifies the identity of a user or entity attempting to access a system using passwords, MFA, biometrics, tokens, and smart cards. Organizations manage authentication through secure storage, rotation, and revocation of credentials.
  2. Entitlement Controls. Entitlement controls determine what authenticated users are permissioned to do within a system using RBAC, Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC), and policy-based access control. These mechanisms define roles, permissions, policies, and access rules.
  3. Intersection Points. Credential management and entitlement controls intersect in an organization’s IAM that brings credential management and entitlement controls together by providing a unified platform for managing identities, authenticating users, and authorizing access to resources. IAM systems handle the entire lifecycle of a user’s identity, from credential issuance and management to the assignment and enforcement of access rights. IAM systems often include automated workflows that integrate credential management and entitlement controls, ensuring that when a user is authenticated, they are automatically granted appropriate access based on predefined policies. IAM systems support entitlement adjustments in real time based on changes in user status, context, or behavior, enhancing security and operational efficiency.

Before entitlement controls are applied, credential management ensures that users are properly authenticated. Once authenticated, entitlement controls enforce policies that define what resources the user can access and what actions they can perform based on their roles and attributes.

Both credential management and entitlement controls can contribute to security monitoring and auditing. Credential management logs authentication events, while entitlement controls log authorization events. Together, they help organizations meet compliance requirements by ensuring that only authorized users access sensitive data and resources, and that access is properly logged and monitored.

Credential management and entitlement control both support the least privilege principle. Credential management ensures that only verified users gain access to systems, while entitlement controls ensure that users have the minimum necessary access (least privilege) to perform their jobs. By monitoring both authentication (credential use) and authorization (entitlement use) events, organizations can detect and respond to suspicious activities more effectively.

In provisioning and de-provisioning, credential management issues and manages user credentials, while entitlement controls assign and update access rights as users change roles or leave the organization.

 

Omada’s Entitlement Management Software and Systems

Omada's entitlement management software and systems

Organizations can customize Omada’s entitlement management software and systems for specific needs, scale them to meet the demands of an always-expanding threat landscape, and integrate them with other IAM solutions to facilitate entitlement management across cloud environments.

Organizations can customize Omada Identity Cloud to manage credential and entitlement controls through the entire identity lifecycle. Omada automates provisioning and de-provisioning, enables self-service access requests and approvals, manages roles including role mining and modeling, implements Separation of Duty policies and constraints, and simplifies the password change process without involving the help desk.

Omada’s cloud native architecture enables a two-tier deployment environment included for non-production and production that maintains security as organizations scale the solution to additional identities and assets. As your organization becomes more complex, Omada uses strong data-matching validation processes to enrich and classify new identities and seamlessly manage credential and entitlement controls.

Omada’s Configurable Connectivity Framework enables organizations to integrate entitlement management to the most used business applications from SAP, Microsoft, AWS, Workday, and more with an extensive range of standard connectors, and an integration model for applications and systems that does not require costly code development. Omada Identity Cloud supports leading application communication protocols including SCIM, REST, OData, and more.

The Omada Identity Cloud Accelerator Package standardizes the implementation and adoption with a best-practice framework for solution design and deployment that reduces risk. Using this approach, organizations may fully connect to HR systems and AD or Azure AD, integrate with two other business applications, implement governance and self-service capabilities, with role modeling for birthrights, and assignment policies based on identity attributes and organizational roles within 12 weeks.

Benefits of Implementing Omada’s Solutions

The three principal benefits of implementing Omada solutions for entitlement management are more efficient operational workflows, improved compliance auditing and reporting processes, and enhanced organizational security overall.

Improve operational workflows

Omada provides full identity lifecycle management and automated provisioning and de-provisioning to empower security teams to meet specific business needs without the need for code development and optimize helpdesk capacity. New employees can get the permissions necessary to do their jobs in near real-time and be productive from the first day on the job. Flexible policy-based access controls can assign a set of access rights quickly and easily to users with the same job role. Roles are defined to match organizational structure, locations, context, or control procedures.

Automated policies and workflows enable users to request access when needed, with approval by their manager or the relevant system owner with automatic Separation of Duty (SoD) checks. Managers can also request access on behalf of their employees.

More robust compliance auditing and reporting

Omada provides a comprehensive overview of the access compliance status across all systems and applications with interactive, user-friendly dashboards for efficient monitoring and reporting.

The system features an audit trail of all activities that are continuously logged, and users are automatically prompted to add additional information and explanations, such as the reason a manager granted a certain entitlement to an employee or third-party contractor. This enables both current state and historic audit reports to be generated on demand.

Organizations can improve compliance by automatically running certification campaigns and surveys to validate that access rights are still needed and current and determine the severity of audit events. The Omada solution also generates reports for activities like attestation and any violations of control or constraint policies. The solution ensures that individuals are not granted toxic combinations of access rights and detects violations, enabling managers to determine whether access should be allowed, with justifications, or removed.

Enhanced organizational security

Omada centralizes identities and access management rights to provide a 360-degree view across on-premises and multi-cloud environments, ensuring that users have access in compliance with policies and regulations. Omada solutions minimize incidences of orphaned accounts to mitigate the risk of ransomware and stop hackers from breaching the perimeter and moving laterally and vertically within your organization’s IT infrastructure.

 

Choosing the Right Entitlement Management Solution

When choosing an entitlement management software solution, the top overall priority must be to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data and applications. Omada helps organizations accomplish this with a configurable, scalable system that automates mission-critical workflows and makes it easy to demonstrate compliance and harden organizational security overall. In addition, a typical organization can deploy this solution in less than 12 weeks.

Consult with Omada to learn more about tailored entitlement management solutions.

 

Conclusion

Effective entitlement management is essential to control and monitor access to your organization’s sensitive data and is a critical factor in stopping costly data breaches. As your organization moves to the cloud, you must implement an entitlement management solution that is proven to be effective in both on-premises and multi-cloud environments. For security teams, compliance officers, and IT executives alike, choosing the right system enables their organizations to meet new and ongoing entitlement management today and in the future.

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