Context: the future of Access Management
What is Contextual Access Management?
IT Security & Access Management continues—by and large—to be based on a static definition of who the user is, despite the fact that day-to-day business has been changing rapidly over the last decade. A static definition works okay in the office. But today, the office isn’t the office: it’s the home office, the coffee shop, the client site. More than that, the workstation isn’t just the computer: it’s the laptop, the tablet, the smartphone.
And this looks like it's about to bring about a pretty fundamental shift in the enterprise approach to access management. This new, mobile workforce means the end of the hard firewall. It means users who need access to the network from everywhere, and the driving factor in access management has become minimizing risk in the new free-for-all.
Recently, we've come across more and more organizations looking for a better solution than the static role-based access model that no longer suits their workforce. Today, users in enterprise networks need different rights based on many, overlapping factors like where they are, what device they’re using, what they need to accomplish and more.
Emerging as the best solution to replace the outdated role-based access model is Contextual Access Management.
The Contextual Access Management Model
- Processes access requests based on the session, rather than the identity. This effectively pushes the inside/outside boundary down to the session/request itself.
- Applies variable levels of access that meet the demands of many different contexts—role, location, time, device, request.
- Qualitatively identifies and ranks the context of each request based on risk.
- Dynamically decides whether to allow or block request.
Making it happen
Because most applications do not implement granular control, access decisions need to be made outside the application via other tools. Believe it or not, this isn't as complicated as it might seem.
There are a variety of tools can be used to build a contextual access system. If you want to learn more about defining and building Contextual Access Management solution, you can download the whitepaper below.
And if you have questions, don't hesitate to reach out.
