Skip to main content

Navigating IAM Challenges

Key Trends and How We Support Clients

In today's world, keeping identities secure is more important than ever, both for business and individuals. As more companies move to the cloud and remote work becomes the norm, it’s getting harder to manage who has access to sensitive data and systems. Identity and Access management (IAM) systems play a vital role in this process, providing a framework of tools and policies to control who can access which resources, when, and under what conditions. IAM covers a broad range of functionalities, including identity and governance administration (IGA), privilege management (PAM), Single Sign On, Federation and compliance reporting. Together, these capabilities help organisations balance the need to protect against evolving threats, reduce internal risks, and keep their operations running smoothly.

Deloitte Switzerland has helped numerous clients to secure their digital assets through Identity and Access Management solutions. Our partnerships and leading market position have given us valuable insights into the common challenges and pitfalls faced by customers. We would like to share some of these insights to guide you in establishing Identity Security to protect your critical assets.

Discover the key industry trends and lessons learned in this article.

 

Securing identities should be one of your highest priorities

 

Challenge

 

Unmanaged or insecure identities are often targeted by cyber criminals to gain access to your organisation’s critical assets and leave you open to data breaches or ransomware attacks. In today’s complex and interconnected systems it is increasingly difficult to enforce controls and ensure the auditability of access to critical data and infrastructure. It is therefore critical to secure and manage your identities to protect your organisation from both internal and external threats.

 

Business Drivers

 

  • Defend your brand reputation by protecting against internal and external attacks through discovery and monitoring, segregation of duties, and least privilege access to prevent and detect misuse of identities.
  • Demonstrate regulatory compliance during audits through automated monitoring and reporting, central visibility, policy enforcement and segregation of duties.
  • Enhance the user experience by establishing frictionless onboarding processes for all identity types, including your customers, partners, employees and external contractors.
  • Securely manage remote access for external users requiring access to critical assets, to improve control over your third-party risks.
  • Enforce user accountability through clear traceability of activities to a single user (external or internal).

 

Our Impact

 

Deloitte Cyber brings 20+ years’ experience across all areas of Identity and Access Management to help clients sustain, transform, and evolve their identity capabilities. We offer clients direct added value with proven frameworks and best practices as well as technical expertise to support clients in implementing Identity Security solutions.

 

Industry insights

 

As strategic advisor and implementation partner for clients in various business sectors, Deloitte finds itself in a unique position: we see what is happening across industries. We are aware of key trends that can help cybersecurity leaders and decision-makers ensure their organisation is secure.

Zero Trust is an IT security model that requires all users, devices and applications to authenticate and verify themselves before being granted access to an organisation's resources on a need to know basis. Identity security solutions help you achieve a zero trust model – for example, monitoring privileged access to infrastructure, just-in-time access, role and policy-based access controls etc.

AI and Machine Learning capabilities are reshaping Identity and Access Management (IAM) by helping companies automate tasks and tightening security. For example, monitoring user activity is becoming easier using automated behavioural analytics tools, which help to catch suspicious behaviour early and take appropriate actions automatically.

Securing machine identities, including for servers, applications, and IoT devices, is a growing priority as they now often exceed the number of human identities in organisations. Companies are implementing Privileged Access Management (PAM) and strict access controls to protect against unauthorised access and ensure secure communication across digital networks.

As organisations adopt cloud-based services, cloud-based Identity Security solutions are gaining popularity. While cloud-based solutions offer greater flexibility, scalability and cost efficiencies, organisations should not overlook the need to protect their on-premises footprint from threats.

With the implementation of global and local regulations such as GDPR, DORA, FINMA, TRMG, NIS 2 etc. organisations face increased pressure to demonstrate compliance in identity security controls. These regulations impose stricter security requirements, making compliance a top priority for organisations.

Lessons learned


Implementing an effective Identity Security solution requires a comprehensive approach that involves multiple stakeholders and encompasses various phases. Find out below some of the key considerations if you are looking to implement or enhance Identity Security in your organisation.

Key Considerations

As part of an Identity Security programme, it is essential to involve business representatives along with your IT teams. Securing identities requires working with application owners, IT platform teams (e.g., Linux, Windows, Directory services etc.), and compliance and risk teams to capture the right set of business requirements.

Develop a comprehensive Identity Security strategy along with a target operating model, including but not limited to policies, processes, and technology solutions, to avoid the need for reworking later in the implementation phase.

Develop a training programme to ensure that end users are properly trained to use the solution, reducing the required effort for operational support. Inform users by providing demo sessions in different time zones, offer tailored training materials, and nominate change champions for service lines or business units. Identity Security solutions are often misunderstood and may come across as complex, and so communication and training is essential to reduce complexity for end users.

Begin by prioritising your most critical systems and identities during the rollout. While it is common to prioritise specific use cases based on perceived importance, conducting a thorough business impact assessment and identifying your crown jewels enables you to prioritise use cases objectively.

 

How can Deloitte help?


Our Capabilities
 

Our proven methodology consistently delivers value by defining, implementing, and maintaining IAM solutions across various industries. It is a scalable approach that can be applied to projects of different sizes. A set of step-by-step, repeatable tasks with enabling tools, templates, and samples makes it possible to execute a consistent, high-quality project, aligned with standards. It is the result of more than 20 years of strategy and implementation experience at large-scale client organisations across geographies and industries.

Skip to description
Key Services Provided

Includes evaluating the current state, defining a clear future vision, selecting the right vendors, and developing a comprehensive roadmap and operating model, all while considering industry trends, technological disruptions, and business needs.

Includes user credentials management, advance authentication (example: Risk-based authentication), authorisation, single sign-on, federation, policy configuration, service monitoring, and the transition to passwordless authentication.

Control and administration of the lifecycle and entitlements of end-users’ identities, including assignment and maintenance of access privileges via enterprise/application roles, enable self-service functions, automate Joiners/Movers/Leavers (JML) processes, preventative segregation of duties (SOD), and certification campaigns.

Includes securing privileged credentials covering lifecycle and credentials management, session management/session isolation, credentials discovery, threat analytics, reporting, and monitoring.

Ensures compliance with regulations like GDPR while enhancing customer trust and engagement. It reduces fraud, streamlines the customer journey, and strengthens brand loyalty by providing a secure and seamless experience to customers.

Deloitte puts forward a collection of tool-agnostic methods, tools and accelerators that will drive consistency, reliability, and efficiency in the execution of your IGA implementation project.

Get in Touch

Reto Haeni

Reto Haeni

Partner
+41 79 345 01 24
Ashish Gupta

Ashish Gupta

Director
+41 79 898 90 32

Did you find this useful?

Yes
No

Thanks for your feedback

Your feedback is important to us

To tell us what you think, please update your settings to accept analytics and performance cookies.

Need help updating cookies?

Our thinking

Domain Deep Dive – Cloud Security

In today's digital landscape, the adoption of cloud computing has become
ubiquitous, offering unparalleled flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency
for businesses.