Top 3 Benefits of Granular Identity Restoration in Your IAM Environment

Identity and Access Management (IAM) plays a crucial role in ensuring the security of an organization's digital assets. With the increasing complexity of cyber threats, it is essential to have robust mechanisms in place to protect sensitive information and prevent unauthorized access.  

But as a single point of entry, your IAM can become a single point of failure if it’s disrupted.

If your IAM access is disrupted for any reason, you may find yourself scrambling to find a fix. While full system backup and restores can be valuable in some cases, a complete rewrite of your entire IAM environment can sometimes do more harm than good. That’s where granular restoration comes in.  

Granular Identity Restoration offers several benefits to enhance the security of your IAM environment. In this article, we will explore the top three advantages of implementing granular identity restoration.

What is Granular Restoration?

Granular restoration, also known as fine-grained restoration, is a process that allows organizations to restore individual user identities, attributes, or specific components of their IAM system in the event of a security breach, system failure, or accidental deletion. Unlike traditional restoration methods that involve restoring the entire system or a large portion of it, granular restoration provides a more targeted and efficient approach to recovering from incidents.

When is Granular Restoration preferred over Full System Backups?

Imagine a situation where part of your IAM system is compromised. Maybe a new employee accidentally grants admin access to an entire department. Or an errant script deletes the accounts of all your East Coast employees.  

In such circumstances, a full system backup and restore can be, in a best-case scenario, overkill. In the worst case, as we’ll see below, it can cause more problems than it solves.

3 Benefits to Granular Identity Restoration

1. Enhanced Security with Lower RTO

One of the primary benefits of granular identity restoration is the ability to achieve a lower Recovery Time Objective (RTO). RTO refers to the maximum acceptable downtime for a system or service after an incident occurs.  

A full system backup and restore can lengthen RTO purely by virtue of the time required to complete such a restore. An entire IAM environment with its affiliated associations can take hours or days to restore, depending on its size.

By implementing granular restoration, organizations can quickly restore individual user identities or specific components of their IAM environment, minimizing the impact of a security breach or system failure.

Granular restoration allows organizations to isolate and address the affected areas without disrupting the entire IAM system. This targeted approach significantly reduces the time required to recover from incidents, ensuring that critical services are restored promptly. By minimizing downtime, organizations can maintain business continuity and prevent potential financial losses or reputational damage.

2. Less Collateral Damage

Another significant advantage of granular identity restoration is the ability to minimize collateral damage. In traditional restoration methods, restoring the entire system or a large portion of it may inadvertently overwrite or affect other components that were not directly impacted by the incident. This can lead to unintended consequences and potential disruptions to the overall system functionality, assuming the changes can be manually recreated. Often the changes can’t be easily recovered from other systems, including change management.

With granular restoration, organizations can selectively restore only the necessary components, ensuring that unaffected areas remain intact. This targeted approach minimizes the risk of overwriting more recent changes, which can introduce new issues or disruptions after the restore is complete.  

By keeping the recovery efforts targeted to a confined problem area, organizations can maintain the stability and integrity of their IAM environment, providing a seamless user experience and minimizing manual re-working and thereby reducing the impact on daily operations.

3. Allows Testing of Backups

Does your IAM backup actually work? Unfortunately, many security leaders cannot answer this question because they have not tested their backup and restore plans. Because a full system backup and restore can be disruptive – as disruptive as an actual IAM outage – many avoid testing altogether.  

Granular identity restoration – because its scope is limited to whatever degree the system admin decides – enables organizations to test their backups with minimal organizational impact.  

With granular restoration, organizations can restore individual user identities or specific components in a controlled testing environment. This allows them to validate the backups and ensure that they are functional and up-to-date. By testing backups without affecting the live environment, organizations can identify any potential issues or discrepancies and address them proactively. This proactive approach enhances the overall reliability of the backup and restoration processes, reducing the risk of data loss or system failures.

For Bonus Cyber Resiliency Points… Add More Frequent Backups

Because of the quick nature of granular backup and restores, you can be empowered to perform incremental backups more frequently than otherwise. Continuous backups of this kind can ensure that your backup data is as up-to-date as possible, thereby supporting your overall business continuity and disaster recovery strategy.

Granular Restores Mean Greater IAM Resiliency

Granular identity restoration has a multitude of benefits and strengthens the overall resiliency of your IAM environment.  

Implementing granular restoration as part of a comprehensive IAM strategy is a proactive step towards mitigating the risks associated with security breaches and system failures.

Is Your IAM Environment Truly Resilient? Reach out to a MightyID IAM expert to assess the resiliency of your current environment.  

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