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Why Identity Access Management is critical for Medium-Sized Businesses. In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, where remote work has become the new norm and organizations are finding themselves under siege from a growing spectrum of aggressive and sophisticated cyber threats, businesses must take proactive measures to safeguard their critical assets. Not only that – stringent compliance regulations such as HIPAA, SOX and PCI DSS are adding their fair share of pressure on top. Under this aspect, organizations are forced to rethink the traditional perimeter-based security model, which no longer suffices as a standalone measure for protecting sensitive data from unauthorized access and ensuring regulatory compliance at the same time, and instead move toward identity-based security schemes. As a result, Identity Access Management (IAM) solutions have experienced a surge in popularity and are now largely recognized as an essential component to any business’s overall security strategy. What Is the Purpose of Identity Access Management? In a nutshell, the primary purpose of IAM is to ensure that only authorized individuals have access to resources based on their roles (Role-based Access Control), responsibilities, and the principle of least privilege, which restricts access to the minimum level necessary for users to perform their tasks effectively. By implementing IAM, organizations can mitigate the risk of unauthorized access, data breaches, and insider threats, while also streamlining access management processes and reducing administrative overhead. In addition, IBM’s 2023 Cost of Data Breach Report has found that businesses who employed an identity access management system were able to reduce the cost of data breaches by 180,358 US-Dollars per year! This is a huge finding, because, let’s face it: the question is not if a data breach will happen, but when it will happen! Why Finding the Right IAM Solution Is a Difficult Task Those businesses who acknowledge the importance of IAM and the benefits it can add will venture out in search of a good solution – only to soon retreat, disappointed and overwhelmed by the mammoth of a project they are faced with. The problem is that the IAM-market is dominated by large solutions geared toward equally large corporations with thousands of IT users. Such solutions are expensive to purchase and maintain and can take months or even years to plan and implement. The reason for this is that you must program individual connections for every app and service you wish to integrate with your IAM platform (including cloud services, M365 applications like Teams, Exchange and OneDrive, any HR, CRM or ERP tools, etc.) and that in turn means creating, testing, and deploying tailored scripts and workflows for each of the numerous systems you wish to manage via the IAM platform. Simply put, it’s a huge effort. Large corporations will have the resources, time and money to stem projects of this magnitude – but what about smaller and medium-sized businesses, who are equally obligated to protect their data from unauthorized access and to stay compliant, but who are chronically understaffed and do not have the budget? What options do they have? IAM Challenges in Numbers In the US, there are currently 166,500 businesses whose employee count ranges between 100 and 10,000, placing them on the mid-market enterprise spectrum. That’s about 48 million employees (and potential IT users) in total. We also know that the ratio of IT staff to employee is roughly 1:27, which means there are about 1,7 million IT workers up against 48 million potential IT users and their assets like laptops, work phones – not to mention all of their privileges that need to be handled as well. We’ve put our finest math wizards on the task to calculate this number, and their rough estimate is that it’s in the gazillions.  What this means is that IT staff are busy: they’re on and offboarding employees, resetting passwords, locking accounts, assigning permissions (and hopefully withdrawing them again when they’re no longer needed) and generally making sure the house doesn’t burn down. Even if their boss approved the budget for it, how are they supposed to find the time to implement a complex IAM solution amidst the day-to-day grind? The answer is: they don’t. That’s why many midsized organizations try to get by without employing an IAM tool, despite the fact that each and every one of those 48 million users poses a huge risk factor if not managed correctly. Security experts are in broad agreement that zero trust is the way to go, and IAM is a key player in implementing a zero trust architecture in organizations. The Solution: No-Code IAM tenfold is a no-code IAM solution that provides out-of-the-box plugins for common apps and services like Active Directory, cloud-apps, the Microsoft 365 suite, and various HR, CRM and ERP systems. That means you don’t have to code anything to use tenfold, you simply install it and start connecting. The software can be deployed within as little as four, instantly freeing up IT staff to deal with more urgent matters while tenfold works in the background, automating processes and making sure no one has more privileges than needed. tenfold simplifies complex and time-consuming tasks with support functions and helpful tools like graphical editors, allowing IT staff to configure features and workflows conveniently via the interface. And don’t worry: no-code doesn’t mean you are missing out on important features. tenfold is a full-scale IAM solution that offers all the advantages you’re looking for: automated, centralized management of users and permissions in local, cloud-based and hybrid environments as well as clear reports and regular access reviews – while eliminating all the disadvantages of highly complex, time-consuming and costly IAM solutions on the market. Watch the demo to learn more about tenfold’s full range of features. Sponsored and written by tenfold.