The corporate world has moved past the times when IT administrators could secure their endpoints by enforcing measures at the network level for devices that operated within the physical boundaries of a workplace. With remote working picking pace and being considered the new normal, businesses are inclining toward security strategies that suit modern business needs and can no longer stick to the data security practices that once worked.
Role-based access control (RBAC) helps IT admins unburden themselves from the continuous efforts required in managing individual employee permissions on the enterprise devices, apps and content while reinforcing their security posture in terms of remote access.
What is RBAC?
Role-based access control (RBAC) is an access management system in which administrators grant access permissions to users based on their roles in the organization. This security system allows administrators to minimize the risk of unauthorized access to business resources and networks by specifically assigning and restricting users with access to only relevant business applications and information. RBAC is generally implemented by enterprises in conjunction with zero-trust security policies to reinforce their security posture, especially in times of enterprise mobility.
How Does RBAC Work?
With RBAC, company IT admins can create specific roles based on the capabilities of an employee or the tasks the employee is expected to perform. Every role then gets assigned a set of permissions and access rights. This works particularly well in favor of company IT admins of large enterprises that have hundreds and thousands of employees.
In large organizations, several people have the same roles and RBAC allows IT admins to grant a specific set of permissions and access privileges to this group of users based on their roles. For example, all doctors in a healthcare facility may be given the right to access patient medical records, but hospital receptionists or ambulance drivers may not be given the same right.
To put it simply, administrators grant permissions to multiple people based on their roles, and not on their individual preferences. These permissions hold rights to what employees can and cannot access, which works in favor of corporate security.
How Does RBAC Simplify Remote IT Management?
1. Enhances Security
RBAC allows IT admins to extend permissions that satisfy the minimum accessibility requirements of the user, just enough to do the job. With this, every employee in the organization has access to only a limited set of data that they need to work with. This minimizes the risk of data breaches and also reduces the surface of external attacks since the hacker will only be able to gain access to the limited resources that the user is permitted to access.
2. Improves Operational Efficiency
Since employee permissions are based on their roles, every employee is granted the exact set of need-to-use access privileges. This relieves IT admins from constantly managing and modifying individual rights and permissions. It also streamlines operations for employees and ultimately reduces the need for employees to constantly contact the IT department for access permissions. Employees can quickly get started with their tasks without spending a lot of time on access rights to kick in.
3. Simplifies Remote Administration
RBAC supports remote working environments perfectly and helps IT admins reduce efforts on managing and assigning countless permissions. With RBAC, IT admins can create a list of permissions for every role which are then automatically assigned to anyone entering the organization in that particular role. These roles need not be modified every time an employee leaves the organization. You can simply remove the employee from the role to withdraw his assigned access privileges. Whether new employees join your organization or existing ones get promoted or resign from the organization, the roles take care of their permissions without requiring IT admins to intervene.
4. Improves Compliance
Businesses are required to satisfy various regulatory compliance requirements to experience unhindered continuity and customer trust. Compliance standards like EU GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, etc., help businesses manage their sensitive corporate data and avoid legal troubles. IT admins can monitor access patterns, trace changes made,and leverage improved visibility of the activities of their employees to ensure strict compliance, making it easier to meet regulatory requirements.
5. Helps in Cost Optimization
Managing RBAC allows IT admins to relieve themselves of tons of mundane IT management responsibilities, which can help them focus on more critical aspects. Businesses can save costs of hiring a large IT team and also save time and effort on security administration. Restricting users to fewer resources also help businesses conserve bandwidth, data, and storage and reduce license costs for various tools.
Applying RBAC to Your Scalefusion MDM Dashboard
Scalefusin MDM lets you leverage RBAC to simplify the management of the diverse roles and permissions to the dashboard. You can either choose from a list of predefined roles extended to you by Scalefusion or create your custom roles.
Scalefusion offers predefined system roles, including Group Admin, Device Admin, and Co-Account Manager, with read-only or read-and-write permissions.
With Scalefusion, you can:
- Use predefined system roles: You can name the role and control the visibility of various features, allow ‘all access’ which empowers the user to read and make updates to the feature, or simply grant ‘read only’ permissions.
- Create custom roles: You can create a new role from scratch and apply it to the chosen devices. You can customize the visibility, ‘all access’, and read-only permissions based on your management needs.
- Customize predefined roles: You can select a predefined system role of your choice and make a copy to further customize specific permissions therein.
- Assign a role to admin: You can modify the role of existing admins, add new admins, or even remove admins and set expiration dates for admin roles.
Closing Lines
RBAC helps businesses confidently extend workplace flexibility to their employees by reducing the security risks involved in enabling remote access. You must first identify your business needs and define permissions to leverage precise control of your employees’ access rights to successfully implement RBAC.
Schedule a live demo with our product experts to explore more about Scalefusion’s Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) capabilities. Please visit https://scalefusion.com/book-a-demo
