Digital transformation has been adopted by most companies from around the world, resulting in a more connected and innovative business environment. Today, digital transformation essentially involves an organization’s adoption of IoT, cloud computing, machine learning, and AI. Continue reading Security or Functionality? Security Risks with Digital Transformation
Author: Dinesh Harikrishnan
Dinesh is a results-driven sales leader with a proven track record of scaling revenue, building high-performance teams, and forging strong client relationships. As our VP of Sales, he brings deep industry expertise, a strategic mindset, and a passion for driving growth through innovative, customer-focused solutions.
How Technology Can Simplify IT Security
Just last year, the popular Q&A site Quora suffered a data breach, as reported by Techworld in their article on UK’s most infamous data breaches. This just goes to show that even the best of businesses are finding it a challenge to secure their data and vital business information in this age of digital advancements.
IT security is, no doubt, an overwhelming, daunting, and expensive task. With cybercriminals getting more advanced and sophisticated, organizations are struggling to find security solutions that will effectively counter them. Continue reading How Technology Can Simplify IT Security
Enforce Device-based Restrictions with Akku
One of the biggest benefits of cloud computing is the level of accessibility it enables – from anywhere, and at any time. However, it is important to set up certain restrictions in order to protect your sensitive applications and privileged user accounts from being compromised.
One such important security measure involves setting up a device policy within your organization. Continue reading Enforce Device-based Restrictions with Akku
Overcoming the Challenges of the Media Industry With Identity
When the digital revolution started, media companies were among the first ones to embrace it. Today, most media companies create content targeted exclusively at online subscribers on digital platforms, pivoting their efforts to become more user-friendly for a digital audience.
In order to convert free digital users into paid users, it is also important to effectively profile them and target the right ads to the right users. Therefore, it becomes crucial to learn more about the users logging in to view media content – whether on an online magazine or a video streaming platform. At the same time, user information that is collected online needs to be safeguarded and the methods used for data handling must adhere to strict regulations. Continue reading Overcoming the Challenges of the Media Industry With Identity
Security vs. Usability
Security vs. usability – the debate has been around for quite a while now. Which one would you prioritize? Would you consider convenience more important than security when it comes to the identity management of consumers? What are your users more inclined to? Is there a way to find a balance between the two? Continue reading Security vs. Usability
Customer Identity and Access Management – How is it different from IAM?
For organizations, it is crucial to ensure data security and, therefore, IAM has become a crucial part of every network security effort. Identity and access management at the organization-level – mostly include IAM solutions for enterprise applications used by organizations to authenticate and validate employees and a relatively small number of users. But how different is the situation with B2C businesses and other organizations who have huge numbers of internal and external users using their online services every day? Continue reading Customer Identity and Access Management – How is it different from IAM?
Data Protection & Data Privacy – A difference that matters
Data protection and data privacy are so closely linked that people (and sometimes even organizations) tend to think of them as synonyms. However, understanding the difference between the two is crucial to ensuring that both protection and privacy are maintained. Continue reading Data Protection & Data Privacy – A difference that matters
Healthcare Data, HIPAA Compliance, and Akku
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has been effective in the USA since 1996.
The Act actually has five different section titles, namely Health Insurance Reform, Administrative Simplification, Tax-Related Health Provisions, Application and Enforcement of Group Health Plan Requirements, and Revenue Offsets – however, the mention of ‘HIPAA Compliance’ most often refers to compliance to the second title – Administration Simplification.
This is the most challenging aspect of the HIPAA Act, as it comes with strict regulations on protecting the data of patients in an industry that is often a major target for data breaches and malicious activity. Identity and access management across applications used in a healthcare facility, therefore, becomes critical to HIPAA compliance.
Here’s how Akku can help in ensuring data privacy and preventing both outsider and insider attacks on patient data, and, ultimately, compliance to HIPAA’s stringent regulations.
Protecting your data
- Akku strengthens security around the login process by allowing you to set up and enforce a strong password policy as well as multi-factor authentication to reinforce password-based security
- It also employs a custom salted-hash encryption methodology – a combination of salting and hashing techniques – for user credentials and data
Preventing unauthorized access
- Akku allows you to exercise tight control over which users have access to what applications and data, so that access is not available to users who may not require it
- It prevents accidental and malicious data breaches by allowing access to applications only from whitelisted network IP addresses and devices
- The system also automatically blocks suspicious access attempts at abnormal times or from unexpected locations, and also enables the set up of time-based and location-based restrictions
Ensuring privacy and accountability
- Every Akku implementation is set up independently in a separate server instance, so privacy on the cloud is ensured
- Akku provides administrators with complete visibility by maintaining detailed logs maintained for every activity taking place across the apps and in the server
Beyond HIPAA
In addition to helping your healthcare facility become HIPAA compliant, Akku also makes it easy to set up integrations across your Hospital Information System (HIS), Lab Information System (LIS), Patient Management System (PMS) and more. This, in turn, improves collaboration between various departments and enhances overall productivity.
To know more about Akku’s complete set of features and their specific benefits to your facility, contact us today!
Akku Vs. Okta – Understand Before you Choose
Akku and Okta are both highly efficient cloud security solutions that strive to help companies manage and secure user authentication on applications in their network, and to transform their customer experiences. Here are a few key differences between the features of Akku and Okta.
Single Sign-on
Akku’s requires only a one-click login for universal login access for all applications. This ensures both high security and productivity.
Okta’s one-click authentication has made user login process 50 times faster. This user-friendly and customizable feature uses OTP to access to 5,500 pre-installed applications, ensuring direct navigation.
Multi-factor Authentication (MFA)
Akku’s MFA is simple, inexpensive, and easy-to-use. It provides multiple layers of security to the sign-in process using Time-based OTP (TOTP) and push notification. The former generates passwords every 30 seconds while the latter generates notifications to authorize login attempts.
Okta’s MFA is secure, simple, and intelligent. It verifies access using user’s knowledge, possession, and biometric factors instead of passwords. It also generates security questions, OTPs, and push notifications for a user’s authentication.
Content Filtering
Akku offers a customizable content filtering feature that ensures high productivity across your organization while improving network security. This functionality prevents employees from accessing and browsing irrelevant websites during office hours and prevents distractions and aids in providing secure network access.
Akku prevents your employees from accessing irrelevant YouTube videos which can affect employee productivity and blacklists their personal email id from being accessed using your network or systems.
Okta, unlike Akku, does not provide any content filtering features.
Time- and Location-based Restriction
While providing access to users anytime from anywhere is necessary, it is important to make sure that this feature does not compromise on security. With Akku’s time- and location-based restriction feature, security will always be on guard to restrict unusual user activities. It also restricts access to your network from specific geo-locations to prevent potential security breaches.
Okta does not offer standard products that provide time- and location-based restriction capabilities.
Password Policy Management
Through this feature, Akku allows you to set a minimum requirement for password standardization. This prevents anyone in your organization from possibly setting weak or easy-to-hack passwords. This also allows for password consistency across your organization.
Okta comes with a password policy standardizer which is similar to Akku’s.
Internal Communications
This feature ensures end-to-end communication between the management and the employees. This feature sends push notifications to the employees for each announcement. These notifications appear as soon as a user logs in, to ensure he does not miss any information. To ensure a response from the employee’s side, it restricts action until he has read and replied to the message. This also helps you in ensuring standards compliance across your organization without any gaps.
Okta does not have a well-structured internal communications system like that of Akku.
Akku, a product by CloudNow Technologies, is a robust identity and access management solution that helps improve data security and productivity and ensures transparency and control in tandem. For the modern organization, it is crucial to maximize security, compliance and productivity across your organization and Akku’s features are specifically built around that purpose. Contact us today to know more about how Akku can help you secure your network.
All the information presented in this article is accurate as of May 5th, 2019.
Is Social Login a Secure Login?
Social login is a form of single sign-on, where users are allowed to log into an application or website using one of their existing social media account credentials. A social login, therefore, eliminates the need for users to register on yet another online platform – saving them the need to remember yet another set of credentials.
If you are a business, you may have noticed that a social login option on your online platform has had a positive effect on the number of registrations you receive. If you are an individual user, you may have found the option to either “Sign up” or “Login with Facebook/Google” and felt relieved that you were able to access the platform in just a few seconds by choosing the latter. But have you ever thought of how secure this method of login really is?
Let us look at the various aspects that affect the security of social login.
Social networks invest more on security
Social login is, by and large, considered to be a secure login method. This is because social media platforms including Google and Facebook are huge, powerful corporations in the online world with more potential than the original business (to whose website/application you are logging into) to set up strong security measures.
One compromised credential = multiple compromised accounts
On the other hand, if a hacker does manage to crack the social account – either due to a weak password or through a brute-force attack, this puts not only a user’s social media profile under threat but all of the applications and websites in which the user has used a social login option. The problem is only made worse with advanced threats like credential stuffing.
Similarly, if an individual’s phone is stolen and unlocked, with a Facebook or Google account that is still logged in, more than just one account is again compromised.
Third-party tracking scripts continue to threaten
Research conducted by Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy revealed that, when you log in to a website or application using social login, a third party might be able to place tracking scripts on the website or application. These tracking scripts have the ability to steal information that you have shared with the website or application during the social login – and sometimes even more than just that!
Although Facebook has announced, post publication of this study, that it would address this loophole in their universal login API, experts say that the issue may be deeper and more complicated than that. It is a harsh reality that a number of companies today create software and tracking tools that can be used to scoop, steal and sell information from such platforms.
So, what is the solution?
While the ease and convenience of social login is undeniable, it is also becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the potential threats of using such a feature. The next time you are thinking about a social login, keep these points in mind:
- Enable multi-factor authentication and risk-based adaptive authentication features that are provided by your social media network. A number of social network providers have set up these built-in security enhancement features, but they may not be enabled by default. Make sure to check your account/privacy settings and make the appropriate changes. This way, an additional layer of security will back you up even in case that your username/password are compromised.
- Check what permissions are being asked of you by the website or application that you are registering to using a social login. There will be a request to access your name, public profile and a few other details sometimes. Provide only information that you think is relevant to the site and deny all others. It might also help if you go back to your social media account and check what all is part of your public profile, and change those settings in order to limit the information you are allowing someone else to access.
- Use the social login feature selectively. If you are wary of a website or application, or if you are sure you will not be using it too ofteis n (and hence will not need a quick login method), then avoid logging in to them using your social media credentials. We suggest creating an email ID only for such occasional-use sign ups and using that to register instead.
If you are a business offering social login, you could offer your users with more security by integrating your application or service with an identity and access management solution (IAM) like Akku which comes with advanced features like multi-factor authentication, location-based restrictions, and suspicious login prevention. We also recommend that you speak to a cloud specialist on other cloud security measures that you can implement.