Access control to my website data is vital if your business has sensitive or proprietary information. Access control is an essential requirement for any organization that has employees who are connected to the Internet. Daniel Crowley, IBM’s X Force Red team head of research, explains that access control is a method to limit access to information only to specific people and under certain conditions. There are two major components, authorization and authentication.
Authentication is the process of confirming that the person to whom you’re trying to gain access is who they claim to be. It also involves the verification of passwords or other credentials that must be supplied prior to granting access to an application, network, file or system.
Authorization is the process of granting access based on a certain job function within the company such as engineering, HR or marketing. The most efficient and well-known method to limit access is to use access control based on roles. This kind of access is governed by policies that determine the required information to perform certain business functions and gives permission to the appropriate roles.
If you have a well-defined access control policy it is much easier to monitor and manage changes as they happen. It is crucial that the policies are clearly communicated with staff to ensure that they handle sensitive information with care. There should be a procedure in place to revoke access to employees who leave the company, change their role, or are terminated.