What is your company’s cybersecurity maturity level? If you haven’t considered cybersecurity capability maturity-model levels, your company’s identity and access management protocols may not be where they need to be. In general, the stronger your information security maturity model is — meaning the more mature your identity and access management setup is — the greater your defense against outside threats will be. Click here to calculate where your IAM maturity ranks on our scale!

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What Is a Cybersecurity Capability Maturity Model?

A maturity model is a tool you can use to assess the quality and effectiveness of your cybersecurity software. The idea of the cybersecurity model is to identify where your company falls in the model and try to move your cybersecurity software up to the highest level possible in order to achieve maximum protection.

The CMM Information Security Maturity Model

One of the most useful maturity models you can use to assess your company’s cybersecurity effectiveness is the CMM, the Capability Maturity Model — also known as the Carnegie-Mellon Maturity Index. This model defines five levels of maturity for your system:

  • Initial — A new process, this is your starting point. This may also be called the chaotic or ad hoc level.
  • Repeatable — You have documented the process well enough that you can repeat its function using the same steps.
  • Defined — You have fully defined that process, and it is now a standard business procedure.
  • Managed — You have consistent, agreed-on metrics for the process that you will use to manage it quantitatively.
  • Optimized —Part of process management now includes improvement of the process.

What does this maturity model mean for cybersecurity? At the initial stage, companies have little infrastructure for identity management. They keep identity data in discrete repositories with manual updates. Data is extremely vulnerable. Hackers may have an easier time accessing the data they want then actual staff members. At the repeatable stage, your company is beginning to use disciplined processes for managing and protecting your data, with some synchronization of data repositories but no overarching system for governing multiple identity data repositories. This is where most companies get stuck. Once your company reaches the defined stage, you have an established system for collection, storage, archiving and publication of identity data with consistent synchronization of databases and directories. Effective cloud-based enterprise systems may be at this level. The managed level is a high level of identity and access management and data protection. The system completely controls identity data, and governance of databases is locked down. To reach the level of optimized, your company must have a self-sustaining identity and access management system that can accommodate virtually any organizational requirements.

Optimal IdM for Accelerated Cybersecurity Maturity

Optimal IdM can catapult your cybersecurity maturity level from a one or two to a four or five almost immediately. With customized identity and access management solutions that can be on-premises or cloud-based, we have the technology you need to automate processes, mitigate security risks and simplify your data environments. With solutions like our award-winning Virtual Identity Server, our LADP migration solutions and multifactor identity authentication, we can provide everything you need to manage your data and lock it up tight. If you’re interested in giving your data an elite level of protection at a cost-effective price point, contact Optimal IdM today for a free trial of our identity and access management solutions.

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Tags

  • The database in which all of your organization’s sensitive identity data is stored.
  • A digital ledger in which digital transactions are recorded chronologically and publicly.
  • Securely managing customer identity and profile data, and controlling customer access to applications and services.
  • The means of linking a person's electronic identity and attributes, stored across multiple distinct identity management systems.
  • A legal framework that sets guidelines for the collection and processing of personal information of individuals within the EU.
  • The policy-based centralized orchestration of user identity management and access control.
  • An authentication infrastructure that is built, hosted and managed by a third-party service provider.
  • A security system that requires more than one method of authentication from independent categories of credentials to verify the user's identity for a login or other transaction.
  • A global provider of innovative and affordable identity access management solutions. 
  • Managing and auditing account and data access by privileged users.
  • Tools and technologies for controlling user access to critical information within an organization.
  • An authentication process that allows a user to access multiple applications with one set of login credentials.