How Your Business Can Deliver Enterprise User Management
Cloud video surveillance has transformed business security by providing scalability and flexibility in a centralized platform, giving security integrators an opportunity to deploy advanced, remote solutions for their customers. However, as migration from legacy video infrastructures to the cloud happens, new risks emerge, many stemming from user management.
A surveillance offering that poorly enforces user management can create data breaches and unwanted platform access inside of customer systems. Because of this, providing a solution with proper user management is a critical component for enterprise platform security, as it will not only help protect customer data but also set your business’ chosen solution apart as a trustworthy and secure cloud platform.
How User Management Strengthens Operations and Platform Security
Effective user management is a paramount component of a complete security offering, especially as your customer’s scale. It serves as both a safeguard and a way to streamline their operations while also aligning permissions with workflow requirements and mitigating internal and external threats.
This is accomplished through several key benefits, each of which enhance your provided solution and can serve as a key driver in winning over new customers. These benefits include Principle of Least Privilege, organizational efficiency, and reduced risk.
Principle of Least Privilege
“Principle of Least Privilege” is a foundational cybersecurity best practice which ensures every user is granted only the minimum level of access needed to perform their role. For cloud video surveillance, this means the platform assists customers as they maintain strict boundaries around who can administrate the account, add or remove users, and adjust settings.
As you seek to provide customers with an enterprise-grade solution, be mindful to offer platforms that allow organizations to implement this principle and enable hierarchical control over user permissions. This dramatically reduces the threat posed by compromised accounts to customer data, since users are not routinely given more access than necessary.
Adherence to this principle is required for compliance frameworks such as SOC II and ISO 27001:2022, and without it, organizations may not be able to meet audit requirements or prove permissions match operational responsibilities. This can be a determining factor for many potential or current customers, making it vital to ensure your represented solution can deliver thorough user access configuration.
Efficient Organizational Workflows
A system that supports modern enterprises goes beyond safeguarding platform data. It should allow you to offer your customers a solution that supports day-to-day workflows, enabling you to deliver more value that scales with their growth.
This can be accomplished by providing a system that streamlines the onboarding and offboarding process, reducing the time businesses need to integrate new employees into their organization, while also ensuring that any security risks posed by former employee accounts are quickly dealt with. By helping companies save resources through a streamlined solution, you’ll also assist their security and IT teams by giving them back time to focus on other tasks for greater efficiency.
Providing a solution that can integrate with single sign-on (SSO) will provide additional value and help streamline workflows, as many SSO solutions support automatic provisioning and pruning of users who are removed from the platform.
Reduced Risk of Unauthorized Access
As every additional user added to a cloud video platform introduces a new potential risk, it’s essential that your business provides organizations with a solution that can help them proactively manage and restrict access to avoid both accidental and malicious damage.
A surveillance platform complete with role-based user access coupled with audit trails can help significantly reduce risk while also providing a higher-value offering. Customers will be able to assign access to users based on the relevance to their needs, as well as quickly identify changes and revoke permissions if necessary. Granular permissions further reduce risk for your customers by giving organizations a wider range of permissions to customize based on the user, such as if they can access certain cameras or manage whole user groups.
In combination, these three benefits of user management enable organizations to defend against misuse of user accounts. For security integrators, this means your solution can integrate more securely into existing and potential customer architectures while also offering advanced features. This builds greater trust and reinforces long-standing customer relationships.
User Management for Video Surveillance System Security
Delivering enterprise-grade user management will help customers enforce cybersecurity best practices, reduce unnecessary burden on their IT teams, and allow your business to stand out from competitors with a secure cloud solution that is simultaneously easy-to-use.
When selecting a cloud system to offer your customers, ensure that your chosen solution has:
- User Groups
- Operational Audits
- Instantly Pushed Changes
- Forgot Password Resets
- SSO Integration
- Multi-factor Authentication (MFA)
User Groups
User groups function by automatically provisioning access to users based on their user group settings. The level of access can be adjusted easily, creating streamlined deployments that are both simple for the customer and the security integrator and help you complete projects with as few roadblocks as possible. Instead of having to go in and adjust each individual’s account permissions or adjust permissions on each device, groups can quickly be given the same level of access.
Operational Audits
Operational audits allow user activity monitoring with historical reports of account-based actions, providing insight into permissions and enabling audit trails to more easily identify user-created gaps in security. These reports provide another powerful tool for both your team and customer teams to ensure the system is secure.
Instantly Pushed Changes
A cloud video platform has the benefit of immediately synchronizing any system updates or changes to all users, devices, and locations. This includes permissions updates, group assignments, or account revocations. This capability nearly eliminates any risk for customers that may occur from permission removals being delayed. Additionally, if your team is managing the customer’s system, the cloud reduces workload associated with updating system settings on-site, instead enabling you to push changes remotely.
Automated Forgot Password Resets and SSO
Automated forgot password resets empower users to recover passwords independently and securely, helping keep customer operations running smoothly and offering an additional backstop against cyberattacks. Additionally, leveraging SSO reduces the need for users to remember multiple passwords, as users can leverage the same set of credentials across platforms.
These combined features can help pitch your chosen solution as an easy-to-deploy system that offers customers greater control over their platform’s security.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
MFA is another key part of enterprise user management and will ensure you can provide a complete solution to customers. MFA requires not just a password but an additional verification factor, such as a code sent to a second device or a push notification, offering an effective safeguard of customer data against those in possession of stolen credentials.
Offer More Control Over User Management and System Security With OWS
User management is a foundational aspect of both cybersecurity and operational optimization in a cloud video surveillance platform. By delivering a secure cloud solution with built-in user management, your business can build long-standing relationships between your company and your customers’ by offering a trusted surveillance platform.
User management in OpenEye Web Services (OWS) enhances platform security with user groups, operational audits, instantly applied permission changes to users and recorders, automated forgot password resets, SSO integration, and MFA. If your organization wants to upgrade your surveillance offering with enterprise-level user management, contact us or book an OWS demo today.
