Christopher Zannetos President and CEO Courion

With the news of costly and damaging data breaches at major corporations now a common occurrence, many CTOs and CIOs may be wondering, “Am I next?” and “What can I do to prevent or detect a breach right now?” Today, Courio , provides an answer: the Access Risk Assessment .

The Access Risk Assessment is a professional service offering from Courion that leverages the industry leading and award-winning Identity and Access Intelligence (IAI) analytics solution, Access Insight, to diagnose access risk in any organization and provide a prescription for a cure: an actionable remediation plan to reduce access risk.
Here’s how an Access Risk Assessment works: Access Insight is installed at your organization for a two-week period during which your IT infrastructure is scanned and evaluated for risk. Identities are categorized and access risk is evaluated based on categories of identities. Based on findings from the assessment, an actionable remediation plan to reduce risk is provided.

The Access Risk Assessment simplifies the complex, providing immediate actionable insight into such risks as:

·         Orphan accounts that are not associated with a valid business owner and do not have proper oversight and governance.

·         Abandoned accounts that have been inactive for a time period that exceeds policy, typically a minimum of 75 days.

·         Privileged accounts with increased levels of permission that provide elevated access to critical networks, systems, applications or transactions.

·         Unnecessary entitlements or excessive privileges, often in conflict with governance regulations, that may exist.

Privilege abuse was cited in 88% of insider misuse cases, according to the recently published 2014 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report . Improving access controls is a smart addition to any organization’s security equation, but it is often overlooked as an effective risk deterrent.
In fact, the report recommends specific identity and access management tactics to address insider and privilege misuse, such as knowing your data and who has access to it and reviewing user accounts. The report also recommends readers adhere to version 5 of the SANS Institute Top 20 Critical Security Controls, which call for controlled use of administrative privileges and account monitoring and control. Access Insight can help an organization meet these recommendations, and the Access Risk Assessment provides an easy way to get started with the identity and access intelligence solution.

For example, a major multinational retailer with more than 80,000 employees in 1000+ retail outlets worldwide suspected access control issues in its organization and assumed considerable non-employee privileged access existed, but was finding its manual investigation time consuming and labor intensive. After Access Insight was installed, the company identified more than 1,000 abandoned contractor accounts that could be terminated. The organization also found 130 accounts of terminated employees that needed to be de-provisioned. The analytics solution also uncovered dozens of users with privileged access through nested entitlements to be addressed. As a bonus, the organization was able to properly classify 97% of its user accounts by defined user types and eliminated 14,000 user groups that were no longer being used.

Access Insight  leverages Big Identity Data, the big data produced by the constant identity and access activity in an enterprise, to provide insight that informs and improves provisioning capabilities and enables continuous compliance. Organizations that take advantage of the Access Risk Assessment receive training during the two-week period on how to optimally utilize the analytics solution by Courion’s seasoned professional services team.

About Courion
With deep experience and more than 600 customers managing over 10 million identities, Courion is the market leader in Identity and Access Management (IAM), from provisioning to governance to Identity and Access Intelligence (IAI). Courion provides insight from analyzing the big data generated from an organization’s identity and access relationships so users can efficiently and accurately provision, identify and minimize risks, and maintain continuous compliance. As a result, IT costs are reduced and audits expedited. With Courion, you can confidently provide open and compliant access to all while also protecting critical company data and assets from unauthorized access.

For more information, please visit www.courion.com