Identity management in the federal government

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Today’s federal government is challenged with the proliferation of identification they must manage.  What is obvious is the COVID-induced necessity to work from home. Agencies have been challenged with scaling up identification management from human beings. But that is just the beginning of the problem.

One way to accommodate that ability to scale is to automate functions and give identification credentials to systems and processes. If you combine that with the surge of IoT devices, you can see how some will argue that machine identities are growing at twice the rate of human identities.

Yash Prakash is the chief strategy officer at Saviynt. He joined host John Gilroy on this week’s Federal Tech Talk and argued that automation is a fine way to scale, but it must be done in a system that provides advanced controls.

One control to start with is simply the visibility of your agency’s network. One cloud provider can handle all the needs of a large agency. The average federal agency is estimated to use 7.3 different cloud providers. This can cause managers to be confused about what is connected to their agency.

During the interview, a study by the Ponemon Institute was mentioned where it said that only 11% of government organizations felt very confident, they have visibility as to what systems and processes are on their networks.

Yash talked about options to gain control of this confusing situation. He reviewed options for elevating access, securing access without a VPN, and how to monitor every privileged session.

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