Without a solid action plan, the implementation of meaningful changes to an enterprise’s identity fabric can seem an insurmountable challenge. Yet before improvements can be made, the current state of your identity program must be clearly defined. An IAM maturity benchmark can reveal uncomfortable truths about your enterprise’s risk posture. An immature IAM program exposes you to cyberthreats, compliance risk, loss of productivity, and/or wasted resources. Consider some of the troubling developments which CISOs must grapple with in 2024.
- A single orphaned account led to the 2021 Colonial Pipeline breach; do you know how many orphaned accounts are in your identity fabric?
- The average cost of a data breach in 2023 was $4.45 MN; is your company prepared in the event of a systems compromise?
- Third-party vulnerabilities can lead to gaps in your security, as was the case with the Target hack of 2013; how comprehensive is your cybersecurity perimeter?
- Regulations drain an average of $14.82 MN from non-compliant companies every year; is your identity solution enabling compliance?
- Research shows that almost 70% of online carts are abandoned prior to a purchase; is friction in your customer-facing identity solution to blame for lost revenue?
- 2023 saw a 78% increase in US data breaches over 2022; do you know what your company needs to do to avoid becoming part of that statistic?
- An IAM maturity benchmark removes the uncertainty from these crucial questions. It provides you with a meaningful measurement of the effectiveness, security, and scalability of your identity and access management solution.
Commencing your IAM Maturity Benchmark
Your journey towards greater maturity begins with an in-depth knowledge sharing session with a team of identity professionals. These experts facilitate a stakeholder discussion about a series of crucial factors which form a profile of your enterprise’s overall identity competency. Under their expert guidance and moderation, you and your peers answer a series of relevant IAM management questions. As a result, this session provides strategic risk management context for your business and seeds IAM maturity knowledge into the process going forward.
This workshop Q&A session results in a maturity score based upon standardized IAM maturity benchmarks. Your score reveals strengths and gaps relative to best practice and companies in a similar posture. Consequently, you and your team develop a common and thorough understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of your IAM program. Ultimately, the identity assessment considers any and all factors which make up your identity fabric and sets them against the standards that matter most.
Your key takeaways can best be understood to fall under one of three major umbrellas. Firstly, security posture. This means knowing where your risk posture stands compared to your peers. Secondly, your planning specifics, meaning your specific benchmark measures with a modeled future. This provides the foundation and rationale for moving one or more of the 8 Levers forward. Finally, your positioning toward maturity. This granular breakdown of the 8 levers of IAM maturity gives ample room for growth and improvement for your IAM program.
Explaining the 8 Levers of IAM Maturity
Our eight levers distill more than 80 individual factors into a single performance report that your key stakeholders can absorb and understand. A few of the questions include:
- User Identity Stores
- How many employees and non-employees work at the company?
- How effective is the onboarding/offboarding process?
- How many redundant copies of user identity data create risks and inefficiencies?
- User Account Provisioning
- Do new employees wait around on day 1 and longer for access?
- Does a centralized security team have control over access to your key systems and applications?
- Do you know how many orphan accounts are in your key systems or applications?
- Credential Management
- Is your company prepared for an enterprise-wide password reset event?
- Does your company have a standard password policy?
- When you issue new login credentials, how many people see the information?
- Authentication and Authorization
- How does the enterprise provide SSO for non-AD-based applications?
- What percentage of your key applications require MFA?
- How does the enterprise manage cloud or SaaS authentication?
- Identity Governance
- How do you manage access certifications?
- What percentage of your applications are governed by a centralized process?
- Can your organization perform account entitlement analysis and role mining?
- Reporting and Auditing
- Are you currently tracking audit-relevant metrics?
- Do you perform analysis on these metrics to draw meaningful conclusions?
- Have you automated the collection of metrics and the monitoring of breach events?
- Operations
- Do you have the resources required to properly support your solutions?
- Does the IAM team follow a standardized change management process?
- Does the IAM team adhere to agreed-upon SLAs for all IAM systems?
- Program Governance
- Does the IAM program operate from a well-organized, long-term roadmap?
- Does the IAM steering committee support the program priorities?
- Has the IAM or security architecture leader developed an IAM reference architecture?
How the 8 Levers Impact Your Maturity Score
By collecting and interpolating your responses to these questions during our initial benchmarking session, the team builds up your IAM maturity benchmark. This report provides you with a quantified, accurate, and easily digestible view of your identity fabric. As a result, CISOs gain a granular understanding of their most pressing identity issues. Additionally, they become much better equipped to make their case for valuable identity investments thanks to the roadmap of recommended improvements.
Within a week, a summary presentation of recommendations is finalized. The team provides you with any additional materials, tools, or templates they think will be helpful to you. Your staff also receive a preliminary plan which prioritizes your longer-term, strategic areas of focus. You will retain access to the online benchmark so you can remodel the value of your IAM program at any time and as often as you like. At this stage, your enterprise has gained actionable insight into how your security, audit readiness, and operational efficiency can be improved.
Once this journey plan has been delivered, the team can provide the continued guidance, solutioning, implementation, and ongoing support necessary to help you arrive safely at your well-planned destination. However, executing on that roadmap using a purely internal team can still be a long and expensive process. Unless, of course, you use a ready-made expert team who is already intimately familiar with your project.
How Simeio executes on your IAM Maturity Benchmark
Armed with a comprehensive understanding of your objectives, current state, and gaps, Simeio creates maturity action-plan to address your key risk areas. Having factored in all the outputs from the process so far and planning the most important next steps, we can now follow through. Beyond offering guidance and recommendations on how moving forward with the next priorities can be achieved, Simeio is able to carry out those improvements. Furthermore, our implementation is guaranteed to be executed with optimal synergy and maximum impact to your overall IAM maturity.
At a tactical level, we prioritize the most immediate actions which drive short-term improvements in the next three to six months. As is the case with our benchmark assessment, Simeio provides a fixed-cost delivery schedule with clearly defined milestones. This ensures that your project does not lag or go over-budget. Furthermore, the direct support from our award-winning service representatives means that your staff always have a guardian angel on speed dial. These identity experts are always ready to assist with all speedbumps and roadblocks to your project’s success.
Simeio understands that the identity needs of every company are unique. There is no one-size-fits-all identity solution which can be plugged in and set on autopilot. Implementation requires fine-tuning and attentive upkeep. Fortunately for your enterprise, can shoulder that burden for you. In an age of identity expert shortages and looming cybersecurity threats, building out IAM maturity is a herculean task.
But for Simeio, it is another opportunity to show the world what identity, intelligently managed, looks like. Contact our identity advisors today and learn how a maturity benchmark session can enable your enterprise.
