Published on July 1st, 2016 | by Guest

7 Reasons Companies Should Use Role-Based Access Control

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is still considered to be in its early stages of development as a low-maintenance scalable system which ensures data security across a network through automated routine administration and control. As opposed to user-based identity management operations built into the organization’s system and individual software applications, the main role of RBAC is to protect networks and intellectual property, among others.

One of the issues related to RBAC is that is it challenging to design and implement and very hard to adapt to their specific business model and security risk tolerance. When we think about RBAC, we need to think about large companies with more than 500 employees which need to find reliable and viable solutions to deliver a streamlined user-access experience for their business users and protect their IT resources by restricting or allowing proper access for their employees. Today, we will take a look at 7 reasons companies should use RBAC as a propeller of efficiency and company development.

1. RBAC is an iron-clad security strategy

RBAC offers companies the possibility of controlling users’ access based on their roles and roles’ attributes within the organization. Upon RBAC implementation, one can formulate the employees’ roles and their working role-based rules. The RBAC allows role-based privileges to be entered and updated quickly across multiple platforms and applications, networks, systems and even geographic locations. Thus, the company’s IT assets and security can be managed in an organized manner.

2. RBAC helps with the maximization of operational performance

If you think about financial institutions, insurance companies or health care providers, you can understand that RBAC can be designed and tailored to streamline and automate transactions, business processes, users’ data management and so on. In other words, they provide employees with hi-tech means of performing their jobs better, faster, more secure and with greater responsibility.

3. RBAC allows organizations to meet privacy and confidentiality requirements

We live in a world where user privacy and confidentiality are mandatory – and in a world where security breaches, cyber attacks, and intentional or unintentional leaks are everyday news. Role-Based Access Control systems help a company to meet its own internal statutory privacy and confidentiality norms and the laws and recommendations imposed by governmental agencies or business partners. By monitoring how data is being used, who, and why is allowed to access certain data and how the data is further secured, a financial company, a health insurance one or even a global retailer can better strategize information security and identity management.

4. RBAC reduces internal and external costs

Some of the RBAC’s advantages can be compared to those of cloud storage: they maximize working efficiency while reducing the company’s costs. More specifically, RBAC eliminates many of the redundant and inefficient administrative tasks and costs when it comes to hiring new employees or locking down the access for terminated employees. There is less manual effort required by system administrators to remove and block access to the company’s system when a user (employee or customer) is terminated. These advantages can be even simpler to describe: companies with thousands of employees and millions of end-users can automate a myriad of processes to ensure internal efficiency and security spending less time, human resources and money to operate changes.

5. RBAC allows companies to safeguard trade secrets and intellectual property

Long gone are the days when an employee could leave a company or switch to another position in the same organization and take sensible data along to leak it or sell it to interested third parties. These malevolent acts still occur, granted, but RBAC is an efficient preventative tool for a company to have its most prized intellectual possessions transferred outside the building or across departments in a safe manner. If an employee moves from one department to another, his role-based access to certain data is instantly removed once the user gains access based on a different role. Inappropriate access from past positions and job responsibilities is lowered thus significantly.

6. RBAC allows better collaboration and organizational development

Role-based access is not limited to employees or end-users, but can be extended to other key players for the company: access can be granted to external strategic elements such as business partners, consultants, business analysts, suppliers, customers and so on. Offering role-based access to certain data a company can maximize its working efficiency and, just as cloud computing, can bring together different specialists to work on common projects or work to solve important issues that require different types of skills and expertise.

7. RBAC eventually makes a company more profitable

If correctly implemented, RBAC is easy to maintain, being a scalable system that grows almost on its own. Thinking about profit and staying ahead of competitors, the design and implementation of RBAC is considered a highly costly strategy. It may be so, but the economic impact of RBAC cannot be overlooked. Cost-conscious organizations cannot ignore the fact that yearly costs of identity management and data security have increased significantly in the past years.

Customer service, call centers, retailers, financial institutions, healthcare institutions and insurance companies among others cannot deny the fact that RBAC is a door opening towards more efficient data protection, usability, compliance and cost-reducing internal and external strategies.

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Tags: access control, companies, RBAC, reasons, role-based, use