Addressing User Access in IT Security Compliance

The risks of non-compliance are not worth taking. You face fines and even imprisonment — not to mention that non-compliance could lead to a serious data breach that might ultimately lose your clients and damage your reputation.

But addressing the murky waters of compliance has never been an easy task, and as regulators add more demands, the task gets even more complex.

Regulators are placing more importance on the user side of security and are strengthening compliance requirements accordingly. For example, National Institute of Standards and Technology Special Publication (NIST) 800-171 states that multifactor authentication should be used to identify user accounts for local and network access, The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) state that access to data should only be on a ‘need-to-know basis. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in healthcare and the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) in the legal sector both state that user actions must be identifiable to an individual. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) requires all employees to log out of their workstations when they leave at the end of the day.

The list goes on.

How UserLock can help you address compliance

Compliance requirements are rigorous and detailed for a reason — to protect you. Therefore, your defenses need to be equally rigorous.

UserLock helps you to go above and beyond many compliance requirements with specific, granular, and configurable user authentication rules and monitoring.

For example, UserLock makes it easy to verify the identity of all Active Directory accounts with multifactor authentication on all local and remote access connections. Once authenticated, UserLock’s logon restrictions help further verify all users’ claimed identity and secure network access. It can restrict access to administrator-approved individuals on a job role, device, workstation, time, or location basis — so that only those who need access have access. And administrators can set UserLock to automatically log out workstations after a period of inactivity or at the end of the working day to close off windows of opportunity for attackers.

These features portray but a few of UserLock’s capabilities when addressing user security compliance issues — and we continually update the software to address the latest compliance requirements worldwide. In essence, UserLock helps you to ensure that your data remains safe, your clients remain happy, your business is safe from fines, and your executives stay out of prison.

With MFA, SSO, and session management, UserLock can protect all employee access to corporate networks and cloud applications, whether on-site or remote. By adding two-factor authentication, access policies, restrictions, and real-time insight around Active Directory user logins, UserLock helps ensure only the appropriate use of critical systems and sensitive data.

And unlike security solutions that require an attacker (internal or external) to perform some kind of damaging action, UserLock acts before any access is achieved and before damage is done – no logon, no threat. Rather than investing in another tool, UserLock allows administrators to monitor and interact remotely with any user session direct from the console. This helps in reducing the time spent tracking user activity by up to 90%.

UserLock stops an attacker’s ability to use compromised credentials at the point of intrusion (the most common threat action*) and as they move laterally within the network in an effort to find, access, and steal data.

You can set different login limitations to ensure every user has sufficient access rights to fully perform their tasks, but no more. Being automated restrictions, this avoids the storm of alerts that turn out to be false positives. If something should fall outside of the established policies, UserLock automatically takes action – not only when IT intervenes.

For more information visit UserLock