When it comes to data security, most people will shift their focus to hackers trying to implement malicious tactics to enter your system. This is why many businesses will spend massive sums of money trying to integrate cyber security techniques that prevent all external threats from entering into the system. While layering access points with firewalls and implementing antivirus software protocols is a critical measure for security, another overlooked measure involves access control.

What is Access Control?

Access control pertains to the segments of data that you’re a business has control over in terms of who can access it. The larger an organization becomes, the more important access control gets. It is worth noting that most of network issues and data breach comes internally within an organization. Employee negligence is inevitable, and human errors have often been the cause of disruption for many business interfaces.

This is why it is incredibly important for business leaders and IT specialists to make sure that the workers within an organization have limited access to valuable data. Access control is not only important because some data is sensitive, but also because data may be completely irrelevant to some sectors of the business.

Therefore, being able to isolate data through security is an incredibly important function. Access control is become a prime stumbling block in large data architectures. To understand why that is, you need to first get some sense of the contextual history.

Background

Twenty years ago data was largely consumed by business intelligence reporting applications.  These systems contained all the complex queries that you needed for producing formatted reports. However, organizations started to find out that the data itself required a more centralized logic.

This was a time when a more diverse and wider adoption of data warehousing started becoming the norm. Access control lived in the business intelligence layer despite data being centralized in warehouses. In those days, any access or consumption of the data that was outside the warehouse was referred to as a rogue query.

Around 2015, this began to change due to cost-effective storage methods. These methods paved the way for centralized data. In recent years, cloud data platforms and solutions have made it possible to make the queries scalable and centralized. With all this centralization, businesses need their data to be flexible to a wide range of different audiences and tools.

This means that you can no longer couple all reports tightly into reports and dashboards. Instead, you need to make your data accessible to different tools and audiences. Having access control rooted into the BI layer is no longer a method that is compatible with today’s highly specific data platforms.

Instead, security needs to travel back into the architecture as an aspect of the data itself. This is the only way IT leaders and managers can ensure that all access to the data is authorized, relevant and segmented.

Stopping Data Breach Using Access Control

Access control is a large topic, and stems as a key component in every layer of cyber security. Similarly, there are many measures which contribute to access control. For instant, multifactor authentication is a method that focuses on access control.

Multifactor Authentication

With multifactor authentication, businesses can help secure remote access. With the onset of the pandemic, shift towards the remote work model is become increasingly important. Therefore, providing remote access available to all employees poses a real threat to the business network.

Multifactor authentication can be pivotal for remote access. Things such as cloud-hosted web applications, remote access, desktops, VPNs and more, need to have multifactor authentication. It also helps separate standard user accounts to privileged user accounts.

If your high privileged IT administrator needs to log in with their domain administrator credentials, you need your service provider to deploy a multifactor authentication step into this process.  Another way to tackle this problem is by logging into any servers. Multifactor authentication is huge in the modern times.

Companies that use file sharing platforms such as Office 365 can enjoy using this measure as well since it is built into the Microsoft tool. Whatever system you have in place, you need to make sure that multifactor authentication is turned on or installed with it.

Disabled Email Forwarding

There have been many cases where a person’s email becomes compromised due to a phishing attack. Perpetrators use malicious emails to get into a worker’s system and turn on forwarding options. By doing this, the perpetrator is able to watch these emails go by to each worker. This increases their chances of breaching the data.

A hacker for instance will forward phishing emails until an invoice will go through. Once it goes through, the attacker will follow up with another deceptive email. Therefore disabling email forwarding is a crucial form of access control.

If you are using office 365 or any other platform, make sure that all the email users are unable to turn on forwarding. There are very few reasons why workers will need to forward business related emails to an external email account.

Email by default is not encrypted which means that this can expose sensitive data over the network. Not to mention, all the data being sent can also be to an attacker’s email. Access control and analysis is also a key cyber security step against ransom ware.

Get Access Control Through Cloud Services Today!

Overall, data breach can be a huge step backwards for a business. Breach does not necessarily have to come from outside, but it can also come from within your organization. It can either be an intentional attempt to corrupt data due to bad blood between worker and management, or it can be an unintentional mistake.

Whatever may be the cause, leveraging from cloud services helps you stay away from the worries of data breach. Prescient Solutions are IT service providers that offer cloud services which revolve around optimized access control and streamlined business protection. Not only that, they also specialize in other cloud security techniques.