Industry Regulatory Compliances in Financial and Healthcare that Require IAM Solutions
As IAM solutions emphasize the importance of its role in helping financial services and healthcare organizations meet compliance requirements, it is imperative to take a closer look at each one of them and how they can be addressed at different levels.
How IAM solutions help financial services industry become compliant with regulatory policies?
The financial services industry, especially sectors such as banking, insurance, risk management, wealth management, asset management, and others are monitored at the State and Federal levels. As per the financial services or banking institution’s structure and charter, it is subjected to various regulations, including Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOx), GDPR, OMB A-123, Basel II, Consumer Privacy, Data Privacy, Check 21, Anti-Money Laundering, SAS 70, BSA, MiFID, PATRIOT Act and others. With the implementation of IAM solutions, organizations are assured of fulfilling governance requirements such as policy enforcement, assessing risks, auditing compliance and reducing frauds.
Here’s how:
Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS):
Imposed to secure debit, credit and cash card transactions by enterprises accepting payments by card. The regulation ensures that personal and sensitive user data of cardholders are safeguarded from being misused.
How IAM implementation helps?
With the help of IAM implementation capabilities such as data access management, companies are able to adhere to the said compliance. IAM ensures providing ‘least privilege’ through the provision of limited access to users, as well as managing non-registered users with the help of identity management system by assigning unique IDs. User management is further undertaken by removing inactive accounts, revoking terminated users, etc. By providing a unique ID to each user, the system ensures that users with appropriate authorization are only able to access cardholder data that is being available across APIs, apps and web links. Further, IAM ensures safeguarding and sharing cardholder data stored in the directory in a secure manner. Access to such data residing in the directory is limited and needs to have authorization based on attribute-to-attribute access level.
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR):
The regulation ensures protecting the personal data and identity information of citizens of the European Union (EU). However, it has far-reaching consequences for global companies as well, as it mandates both domestic and foreign enterprises to seek consent from users regarding the usage and access to their private data. Companies are also responsible for safeguarding the information that has been gathered during the collection process, along with storing them securely.
How IAM implementation helps?
Data protection is at the core of GDPR compliance, as users have the right to deny companies from collecting their personal information. Thus, to ensure GDPR adherence, the IAM solution also needs to go beyond basic monitoring of user access to consumer data and identity information. It should, in fact, need to focus on tracking every access to the collected personal data and update access rights based on not just changes in the organization but also as per relevant consumer preferences. Some of the IAM functionalities that can help companies to minimize or avoid penalties include identity provisioning, identity federation, data tracking and retrieval to manage user consent, assistance services for enabling users to erase their data, and notification to users about any data breach incident, among others.
Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GBLA):
Specifically implemented for financial institutions to not only safeguard user information but also to regulate how such information is being collected and removed from the system. The Act puts special emphasis on sensitive data such as credit history, social security numbers and account details of the users. It also includes safeguards for consumer financial information and provides privacy for more benign information such as address and phone number. The compliance mandates financial institutions to create and maintain information security programs.
How IAM implementation helps?
Implementation of IAM ensures that GLBA privacy rules are enforced seamlessly, that mandates financial services organizations to minimize risks associated with user data, by implementing solutions such as segregation of duties (SoD), access management, access monitoring, ‘least privilege’ principle, revoking terminated access permissions, privileges and access rights auditing, etc. Further, financial institutions are also required to ascertain that all financial services employees are aware of the provisions in The Safeguards Rule of GLBA compliance and undertake security practices to comply with the federal privacy policies. IAM solution can help in proactively addressing the challenge through role-based management, automated provisioning and de-provisioning of users, entitlement management and multi-factor authentication (MFA).
Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX):
The regulation mandates that organizations in the Banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sector should implement, test and document internal controls for all activities involving financial data, whether digital or physical.
How IAM implementation helps?
As the compliance focuses on both physical and digital records, implementation of IAM ensures improving the security posture and minimizing the risk of data breaches. IAM not only aligns companies with the SOX requirements to provide on-demand reports for an audit, but it also ensures data security through features such as user provisioning and de-provisioning, access logs, access controls, centralized administration for managing authentication and access rights, SoD policies, usage tracking and others.
California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA):
Similar to GDPR, the regulation provides citizens of California the right to manage and control their personal data. The regulation is applicable on any enterprise generating gross revenue of USD 25 million or more that collects personal data of consumers from California.
How IAM implementation helps?
With the implementation of IAM solutions, such as identity management, access Governance, authentication including multi-factor authentication (MFA), centralization administration of identity and access management, companies can ensure fulfilling CCPA compliance requirements related to data security and privacy requests.
How IAM solutions help healthcare sector become compliant with regulatory policies?
Many healthcare organizations look at regulatory compliance as a liability. However, they fail to look at it as an opportunity to create agile IT systems by setting the right networks and placing application integrators that seamlessly interact with the IAM systems that ensures compliance. Regulations such as the ones in the Healthcare sector – HIPAA, HITECH act as high-level guidelines rather than prescriptive recommendations, but many organizations treat them as comprehensive security rulebooks. IAM experts discourage this kind of approach as it leaves healthcare providers compliant with regulations, but not in the spirit of regulation.
Identity and Access Management (IAM) Technology fits precisely to the requirements of any healthcare establishment to comply with HIPAA. In addition to various automated mechanisms such as audits, notifications, password self-service, strategically aligning business goals to identity management, access governance and IT security systems have become the need of the hour.
Here’s how:
Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH):
The Act, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) bill in 2009, mandates healthcare providers to ensure adoption and “meaningful use” of electronic health records (EHR) technology, wherein healthcare organizations are required to demonstrate the usage of certified EHR technology. HITECH also necessitates security audits, paving way for the enforcement of HIPAA as well.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA):
Implemented in 1996, it is also known as the Kennedy-Kassebaum Act. HIPAA enforces the establishment of the national standards for electronic healthcare transactions, combined with national identifiers for health insurance plans, providers, and employers. It necessitates companies to adhere to the data and privacy regulations of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), ensuring the security of protected health information (PHI).
How IAM implementation helps?
Healthcare IAM solutions help in developing a robust information sharing module that not only prevents unauthorized access, but also helps in adhering to government regulations. A holistic IAM solution helps to standardize identification and authentication of users (external, internal, vendors), devices, medical systems, locations, and organizations within the healthcare community, supports strong user identity, access and security controls to uniquely and securely authenticate and authorize each user and adopts a governance-based approach to comply with regulations in the sector. Some of the integrated capabilities of healthcare IAM include Single single-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA), least privilege management, account provisioning, and de-provisioning and others.
Further, integrating patient management systems, such as Cerner and Epic, with IAM infrastructure is important for better reporting, faster on-boarding/removal of employees and easier management of user identity. In addition to management of user identity, an integrator also helps to improve efficiency, along with reducing errors, password resets and improper access.
Federal regulations and industry standards mandate businesses to enforce IT audit controls. Regulatory compliances defend enterprise systems for the protection of user accounts, shareholders, the public and most importantly a business brand. Therefore, regulations concerning privacy and separation-of-duty requirements are here to stay, and perhaps evolve for better!
While achieving compliance to regulations, security professionals need a strong hold on attaining tactical goals through managing, measuring and monitoring IT governance initiatives. It is recommended that the tactical goals are aligned to regulatory environment, applicable standards and controls. Integrated business systems for industry specific or cross-industry compliance requirements need to be achieved by keeping a close watch on core and non-core business applications. In addition, stepping-up the legacy architecture by bringing together IT systems with current business requirements will make them more responsive towards regulatory dynamics.
