Easy Methods to Overcome Data Loss and Reduce IT Costs by Deprovisioning

Introduction

Consider a scenario where a software development team is working on multiple projects for various clients. Whenever a new client is onboarded, IT admins hurry to provide their teams with the required access to various applications and onboard them to the cloud consoles. It is quickly carried out so that the team can start working on the project and meet the project deadlines. During this process, tracking and documenting all the accesses sometimes take a backseat leading to potential security risks and breaches, costing the service provider for over-provisioning.

Potential risks of over-provisioning are incurring enormous bills, costing issues, data loss, lack of visibility, no tracking, and monitoring, etc.

Stats Review

According to a popular survey conducted by IBM, it was identified that data breach costs rose from USD 3.86 million to USD 4.2 million, and more than 60% of companies go bankrupt within the first six months of such a data breach attack.

How can data breaches and loss of critical information magnanimously affect a company’s growth? Let us have a look.

Reasons why Deprovisioning is overlooked

• To save costs, many companies track provisioning manually
• Deprovisioning is time-consuming, especially if the IT department must remove access to each application individually
• Most of the time, client IT teams are understaffed or not qualified enough; the consulting firm shares its resources with the client to build applications
• During a high-priority project,
• . These apps are not traced and tracked and can lead to a possible data breach
• Onboarding new clients and provisioning the team take precedence over deprovisioning clients whose contracts have ended

Streamlining the Deprovisioning process

Is this a management problem or a technological one?

As a company grows, the clientele expands, and onboarding staff to look after technical resources is not sufficient. With multiple cloud platforms implemented for various clients, it is next to impossible to keep track of every application, withhold access to certain employees, and grant and remove privilege permission periodically.

Solution 1:

One way to solve these issues is through Identity and Access Management (IAM). Tech-savvy organizations leverage the benefits of IAM to cater to their provisioning needs for their employees. With a good IAM solution, administrators can structure and track all apps with minimal effort. With IAM’s role-based access control (RBAC), the IT department can easily onboard new users for specific applications, and then offboard with minimal effort.

Let us consider an IAM user with the below two policies and guess what the overall effect would be. Hint: It is known as the IAM Authorization hierarchy.

Solution 2:

A multi-account structure can assist many firms to satisfy the particular needs of each application team or business group.

AWS Organizations is an account management service that lets you consolidate multiple AWS accounts into an organization that you create and centrally manage. With Organizations, you can create member accounts and invite existing accounts to join your organization.

In AWS Control Tower, Organizations help centrally manage to bill; control access, compliance, and security; and share resources across your member AWS accounts.

AWS Control Tower is a pre-configured multi-account architecture with pre-configured security and access settings and a dashboard to manage that multi-account architecture over time.

With AWS Control Tower you can achieve network isolation, scalability, and compliance. AWS Control Tower automates the process of creating and configuring multiple accounts on Amazon Web Services. It is the solution we require for centralized AWS governance administration in a situation including multiple BUs with varying needs and infrastructures. Learn more about AWS Control Tower in the follow-up blog.

Solution 3:

The other problem is keeping track of instances that are running in the development landscape. While Production environments are traced and tracked to keep a check on instances and resources that are running, tracking development environment resources take a step back. This leads to potential over-costing issues which the client is not going to be happy about. It creates tension between stakeholders and the company can lose high-revenue clients.

The solution to this is My Cloud Cleaner.

An application that keeps track of all the cloud resources that are running in the development environment and monitors the utilization threshold for multiple clients. This product has a wide range of features that helps in cost savings, a list of top five users that are using maximum services, and generating larger bills. My Cloud Cleaner is your single point to visualize all AWS accounts resources and costs.

If you want to learn more about Cloud Cleaner, drop a query in the below comment section, and our team of cloud experts will reach out to help you with your deprovisioning needs.

Conclusion

Data loss and insider attacks can have enormous potential for a company’s growth. Hence, following the best practices of IAM can help secure your IT assets and prevent internal or external attacks.

So, I hope you have an idea about the importance of deprovisioning.

About CloudThat

We here at CloudThat are the official AWS (Amazon Web Services) Advanced Consulting Partner and Training partner and Microsoft gold partner, helping people develop knowledge on the cloud and help their businesses aim for higher goals using best in industry cloud computing practices and expertise. We are on a mission to build a robust cloud computing ecosystem by disseminating knowledge on technological intricacies within the cloud space. Our blogs, webinars, case studies, and white papers enable all the stakeholders in the cloud computing sphere.

Feel free to drop a comment or any queries regarding deprovisioning, IAM, or consulting, and we will get back to you quickly. You can go through our Expert Advisory page and Managed Services Package for CloudThat‘s offerings.

WRITTEN BY Anusha Shanbhag

Anusha Shanbhag is an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Technical Content Writer specializing in technical content strategizing with over 10+ years of professional experience in technical content writing, process documentation, tech blog writing, and end-to-end case studies publishing, catering to consulting and marketing requirements for B2B and B2C audiences. She is a public speaker and ex-president of the corporate Toastmaster club.