The Covid19 crisis has forced numerous companies to quickly provide home office tools for employees.
Many large companies have offered their employees such options for a long time. With the spread of the coronavirus, “all” these companies had to do was make this existing infrastructure available to a larger group of employees.
The IT setup of small and medium-sized businesses was and is, however, strongly challenged by these new circumstances. In many cases, the relevant IT infrastructure had to be set up very quickly. Questions, e.g. related to shared folders for documents and access permissions for these folders, had to be resolved immediately. In many cases, ad hoc solutions using various tools were approved for use as workarounds, or implemented by employees themselves.
How can Identity and Access Management help?
An Identity and Access Management (IAM) system helps all companies to cope with these issues. With the help of a modern IAM system, for example, not only are access rights to existing programs managed, but authorisations for shared folders can also be handled efficiently. It is important to prevent valuable company know-how from being stored in an uncontrolled manner on insecure cloud applications, or outside Europe (see FDPIC list) and then being forgotten about.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Do you know whether your employees use “free” cloud platforms to share company data – and if so, which ones (Dropbox, Google, WeTransfer, MS Teams, etc.)?
- What happens to your company’s data if an employee leaves the company?
- How do you handle project-specific problems (temporary access, external access)?
- Do you have control over who has access to which documents and when?
If you don’t have the right answers to these questions everywhere, you need support to set up or maintain an IAM system, or you are interested in assessing the situation in your business, then contact us – no strings attached!