To begin understanding compliance, healthcare organizations would be wise to consider three key recommendations.

Analyze the past to avoid making the same mistake twice It is important for hospitals and healthcare facilities to look at some of the common mistakes that are repeatedly noted in HIPAA security reviews.

This includes impermissible uses and disclosures of protected health information, lack of safeguards to protect health information, lack of patient access to their personal health information, lack of administrative safeguards on electronic protected health information, and use or disclosure of more than the minimum protected health information.

Protecting valuable data by analyzing past mistakes is an important step in the compliance process.

The confusion and lack of understanding around the two examinations has been common among healthcare professionals in the marketplace for some time.

According to HHS and Office for Civil Rights (OCR) guidelines, all healthcare organizations must specifically conduct a risk analysis to be considered within HIPAA compliance.

IT managers face a constant challenge to justify spending, demonstrate business value and quantify the impact of security incidents.

Identity and access management (IAM) domains are key because they enable IT teams to address risk and facilitate operational and revenue gains.

Provisioning and deprovisioning improve the user experience, operational efficiency and security policies and are integral to business operations.

The Value of Provisioning and Deprovisioning –  Automated Provisioning and deprovisioning activities include creating and propagating user accounts; requesting, approving and granting access to resources; changing users’ access over time; and decommissioning accounts when no longer needed.

A well-built business case should include the fully loaded costs of software, process changes, organizational changes, hosting, change management and even effects in culture.

Whether or not the value exceeds the costs, there is value in simply demonstrating to your stakeholders that you fulfilled every aspect of diligence.

Often these are cloud-based services that sit outside of your network.

These include: An authentication assertion that shows the requesting user or device is who or what it claims to be.

These assertions are XML or JSON documents that contain all the necessary information to verify users to a service provider.

SecurEnds Cloud IAM product enables Identity Access and Lifecycle Management for Provisioning and De-Provisioning of user access in AWS, Azure and GCP cloud platforms.

The product manages Cloud Governance to meet security and audit compliance.

It manages Cloud user permissions for employees, partners, customers and access approval management.

SecurEnds is serving a growing number of credit unions and community banks by allowing them to stay secure and compliant with Credit Union Administration (NCAU) Guidelines and Federal Financial Institution Examination Council (FFIEC).Our User Access Review & Identity Lifecycle Management solutions can be rapidly deployed on-premise or cloud and come with industry leading flex-connectors for seamless integration with typical credit union applications and service management software.Learn how our cloud-based solutions can work together to help your Credit Union with all aspects of Risk & Compliance.Enterprise Risk Management:From assessing individual risks to monitoring key risk indicators (KRI's) and controls, SecurEnds brings all of your ERM information together.

SecurEnds automates your processes to enable officers to spend less time chasing information and more time analyzing the performance of the risk and compliance controls in your Credit Union.Vendor Management:Third-party risk is a hot topic for regulators.

When a Credit Union outsources an activity to an outside vendor it can introduce new and/or increased risk to the organization.

Vendor Management is all about identifying, assessing, measuring, monitoring and controlling those risks.

SecurEnds Vendor Management solution enables you to have all your vendors, contracts and reviews in one central place eliminating duplicate spreadsheets and minimizing the manual effort involved in collating a vendor's information.Cybersecurity:SecurEnds end-to-end Cybersecurity assessment tool enables organizations to identify, analyze and prevent cybersecurity breaches in their businesses.

The tool is pre-populated with the full suite of either the FFIEC or NIST controls which can be easily configured to suit your Credit Union.

Cloud Adoption is at an all-time high and enterprises around the world are adopting a ‘cloud first’ strategy.

Along with that, there is a dramatic increase in the number of organizations getting breached in the cloud space – and majority of those breaches had something to do with Identities and its related entitlements.

CIEM Solutions focuses on IAM Governance, mainly by reducing the risk of over-privileged identities in a dynamic multi-cloud infrastructure.

Core CIEM Capabilities: Visibility and Inventory: Inventory of all Human and Machine Identities across Multi CloudView Overall IAM Compliance Score by Cloud Account or Account GroupsDetect identities and resources with excessive permissions and entitlementsView and monitor Access Key usageDeep visibility into entitlements and access patterns.

Auditing: Timeline view of changes to sensitive resourcesTrack recent access changes across cloud infrastructureTrack user activities generate audit reportsView traffic patterns in the networkAudit granular permissions of IAM users, roles and service accounts.

Governance: Enforce predefined and custom IAM policiesOne Click Remediation for unused entitlementsRight size roles across cloud service providersDiagnose and fix IAM failures.

Implementing user access review best practices can help to eliminate or avoid the mentioned risk scenarios.

Best practices that application business owners can implement to help ensure effective user access reviews include: When a new business user joins the team, the application business owner attests and provides relevant roles and access levels for the business user.

When a business user leaves the team or changes roles, the application business owner validates the user and the user’s access level for any updates or removal.

At predetermined intervals (prescheduled part of calendar of activity), a business user access review is automatically triggered or manually initiated.

The application business owner receives a list of existing business users, roles and access privileges.

Any change to the application business owner and/or delegate is to be updated as part of transition from current contact to new contact.

 Identity governance and administration (IGA) is a policy-based approach to identity management and access control.

As the name implies, IGA systems merge identity governance and identity administration to provide additional functionality beyond traditional identity and access management (IAM) tools.

Particularly, they offer valuable support in auditing and meeting compliance requirements.

IGA systems can also help automate workflows for provisioning and deprovisioning users.

Before we explore how IGA can support you and whether it makes sense for your organization, let’s define its components:  Identity governance: Processes and policies that cover the segregation of duties, role management, logging, access reviews, analytics, and reporting.

Did you purchase large IGA product and have not implemented for many years?

User Access Reviews is way for organizations to maintain, uphold IT controls and comply with regulations such as SOX, FFIEC, ISO 27001, PCI- DSS, HIPAA etc.CHALLENGE: A publicly held cloud communication provider of residential telecommunication services has significantly grown its IT landscape through multiple acquisitions over the years.

It had implemented Okta for access Management.

However, the Audit department continued to manually conduct quarterly access reviews to satisfy SOX standards.

A large part of review was focused on validating User Access Control, including credentials and entitlements across Okta enabled and legacy telecommunication applications.

SOLUTION: Facing rigorous requirements for compliance and risk management, Telco Company approached SecurEnds for its product that could be added on top of Okta to automate Access Certification process.

A tailored demo followed by a five-day proof of concept (POC) established SecurEnds as the solution of choice.

To ensure privacy and safeguard an individuals’ medical data the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was passed in the year 1996.

HIPAA applies to any covered entity that:collectscreatesor transmitsProtected health information electronically and their business associates who encounter such health information in any way throughout the work that has been contracted.HIPAA mandates such entities to comply with a set of standards that outline the lawful use and disclosure of protected health information.Healthcare organizations and their business associates are migrating to cloud at a rapid pace on account of the:scalabilityflexibilitycost-efficiency that cloud has to offerHowever, they are worried about “how to make the most of the cloud while being HIPAA compliant and secure?”While the HHS’s guidance on HIPAA and cloud computing states that:the cloud service providers (CSP) should sign a business associate agreement and;that CSP’s are directly liable for compliance with applicable requirements of HIPAA rulesThe enterprises often overlook the security responsibility in the shared responsibility model that cloud service providers operate.A CSP can only put in place safeguards to enable cloud usage in a manner that is HIPAA compliant; but the covered entity is responsible for ensuring HIPAA compliance and ensuring there is no misuse or misconfiguration.No data should be shared through the cloud unless protected by an end-to-end encryption.

The covered entity should ensure that the CSP uses the highest level of encryption.

However, encryption alone does not give the necessary protection and satisfy all security rule requirements.

The covered entity should be able to define all the security rules in the cloud and implement the best security practices to ensure their protection in the cloud.At SecurEnds, we believe that coveted entities under HIPAA must conduct an ongoing assessment to know who has access to what resources and whether that access is appropriate.

SecurEnds products once configured as a single unit or as a bolt-on to existing Identity Access Management (IAM) solution will create powerful governance and provisioning/ de-provisioning tool across clinical, financial and back-office applications.

These challenges are often too complex and dynamic to be managed effectively by the native tools provided by cloud service providers (CSPs).

The emerging CIEM category defines technologies that provide identity lifecycle and access governance controls, which ultimately reduce excessive cloud infrastructure entitlements and streamline least-privilege access controls across dynamic, distributed cloud environments.

For Privileged Access Management, a CIEM should: Monitor and prevent entitlement misuse.

Assess the necessary duration of entitlements.

For Identity Governance & Administration, a solution should cover: Visibility, governance and compliance oversight.

Monitoring excessive and risky entitlements.

The workflow management software saves it on the cloud, making it readily accessible to everyone in the team and store it in a secure manner.

Timely Order Placement – Order placements may no longer be slowed down as you can choose to automate it with pre-defined fields and place orders every month.

It can be modified when needed and sends notifications to concerned teams.

Maintain Contracts and Permit Information – A workflow software utilizes the power of the cloud where all your vital information including contracts created, client database and permit information is stored.

Authorized people in the team can access it from any device, any time and make timely decisions.

Simplified IT Management – Setting up an IT infrastructure for your company is simplified as it can help automate software updates, create requests to buy new hardware and notify teams of installation status.

 Insufficient access removal for terminated employee leads to audit finding, and potential breaches.

As soon as the decision to terminate an employee has been made, IT admin should receive a near real-time notification.

IT admins are typically responsible for securing data, managing access to resources and maintaining permissions and access rights policies across the assets.In our research we found that organizations with employees between 250 to 1500 display varying degree of Automated Provisioning and De-provisioning maturity.

Unsurprisingly, a large percentage of companies and non-profit organizations have manual deprovisioning where the onus of timely withdrawing employee access across systems and databases is spread across the reporting manager, HR, IT administration.Based on our experience configuring our SaaS product to help SMB companies manage employee termination, we recommend the following:Use a software that automates termination workflow between HR system and downstream systems.

Many of our customers use SecurEnds easy integration with service management systems such as Jira, ServiceNow to open deprovisioning tickets.

Unless your organization has done periodic evaluation of employee entitlements, there is no way to know with 100% surety what access the employees enjoyed beyond just what his role allows.SecurEnds recently hosted a tailored demo for a banking prospect.

Like many businesses, you may already claim that your organization is “HIPAA Compliant” somewhere on your website.

No matter how true your statement is, self-attestation is not always—or is it even terribly often—considered the most reliable source of information about such crucial matters.While your word may be good enough for vendors with whom you have worked for years, their other clients and associates may not think it enough to protect them from risk.

Every business along the chain of association must answer to someone else; therefore, it is essential to have verifiable proof of HIPAA compliance.Following are three ways to prove your organization has officially achieved HIPAA compliance, so your enterprise’s hard work is easily and verifiably recognized.

Self-AssessmentsWith the self-assessment path to proving HIPAA compliance, there is no need to obtain third party verification or auditing services.

Of course, this way of providing proof is the easiest, most expedient and least expensive, in terms of immediate costs.

The need to comb through all the policies and procedures on your own—without the assistance of a well-versed, professional HIPAA auditing team—can be laborious, to say the least.Take a quick look at some additional challenges of taking on self-assessments: Self-attestation requires reviewing mountains of supporting documentation, which may include screen shots of settings and links to policies, to illustrate an organization’s compliance.

This unstructured data lives in file shares, SharePoint, and cloud storage systems such as OneDrive or Box etc.

Mitigating data loss and data breaches requires continuous access audit and remediation.

Automate the data access certification process for the lines-of-business.

Remediate inappropriate access and put in place a consistent methodology for group- based access to file shares and SharePoint.

To Know More Information: https://www.securends.com/data-access-governance/  Key Benefits Data Access Governance:  Unmatched Visibility – Enables IT and the business to know definitively who owns enterprise data resources, who has access to what data resources, how they got access, whether they should have access, and who approved it across Windows file shares and SharePoint.

A closed-loop workflow tracks and audits access changes, providing the evidence needed by auditors and regulators.

The objective of providing an Active Directory Federation Service is to drastically simplify access management within the organization.

ADFS supports identity management and provides a Single Sign-On solution, this is how;When a third-party, say your company’s clients, partners or vendors need an access to your environment, ADFS authenticates their username and passwords that allows the sharing of identities between the organizations securely, this is also known as “Federated Identity Management” as Federation means trust between your company and the third parties.ADFS offers Single Sign-On, where the users can sign on to multiple applications, without having to validate their credentials each time they log in.

Users need only one strong, secure credential to log in to their applications.ADFS for your organization – a good choice?Deploying an Active Directory Federation Service should be a well-thought decision and shouldn’t be opted for just because businesses around you are going for it.You may be able to make an informed decision after reading the advantages and disadvantages of ADFS as given below –Single Sign-On to applicationsThe Single Sign-On solution is a real time-saver and enhances productivity.

Employees have access to multiple applications and with SSO, they can login to all their applications at one go with only one set of credentials.

This saves a lot of their time and helps them become more productive.Secure third-party connectionsWhen a client or a vendor needs access to your environment, you cannot deny them the same.

However, the question of how secure the access is, would surely bother you.ADFS authenticates a user’s identity and helps establish a federation trust which builds secure third-party connections and makes sharing information between your organization and trusted partners much easier and secure.Easy access to cloud appsAccessing the applications on your Active Directory is undoubtedly a lot simpler.

Digital transformation is not a flash cut.

This adds a different level of complexity for any Identity Lifecycle Management solutions.

Okta has emerged as the most viable alternate to Microsoft Azure for access management.

It offers standard Identity Access Management services such as single sign on (SSO) and multi factor authentication (MFA).

SecurEnds product has emerged as the leading complementary Identity Audit and Governance product to Okta.SecurEnds is an Okta Integration Network partner and its product portfolio is currently being used by many Okta customer across the industry to do access verification, user attestation and compliance governance for different identities (services accounts, employees, contractors, BYOD devices etc.)

Okta to SecurEnds integration is available from the Okta Integration Network (OIN) catalogue at no extra charge to help you achieve the following uses cases.Use Case # 1:Access certifications and entitlement review for both Okta enabled and custom application.