Providing a corporate IT infrastructure is a strategic challenge. Delivering all services needed and fulfilling all requirements raised by all stakeholders for sure is one side of the medal. Understanding which services customers and all users in general are using and what they are doing within the organisation’s infrastructure, no matter whether it is on premises, hybrid or in the cloud, is for sure an important requirement. And it is more and more built into the process framework within customer facing organisations.

The main drivers behind this are typically business oriented aspects, like customer relationship management (CRM) processes for the digital business and, increasingly, compliance purposes. So we see many organisations currently learning much about their customers and site visitors, their detailed behaviour and their individual needs. They do this to improve their products, their service offerings and their overall efficiency which is of course directly business driven.  Understanding your customers comes with the immediate promise of improved business and increased current and future revenue.

But the other side of the medal is often ignored: While customers and consumers are typically kept within clearly defined network areas and online business processes, there are other or additional areas within your corporate network (on-premises and distributed) where different types of users are often acting much more freely and much less monitored. 

Surprisingly enough there is a growing number of organisations which know more about their customers than about their employees.  But this is destined to prove as short-sighted: Maintaining compliance to legal and regulatory requirements is only possible when all-embracing and robust processes for the management and control of access to corporate resources by employees, partners and external workforce are established as well. Preventing, detecting and responding to threats from inside and outside attackers alike is a constant technological and organisational challenge.

So, do you really know your employees? Most organisations stop when they have recertification campaigns scheduled and some basic SoD (Segregation of Duties) rules are implemented. But that does not really help, when e.g. a privileged user with rightfully assigned, critical access abuses that access for illegitimate purposes or a business user account has been hacked.

KYE (Know your Employee – although this acronym might still require some more general use) needs to go far beyond traditional access governance.  Identifying undesirable behaviour and ideally preventing it as it happens requires technologies and processes that are able to review current events and activities within the enterprise network. Unexpected changes in user behaviour and modified access patterns are indicators of either inappropriate behaviour of insiders or that of intruders within the corporate network.  

Adequate technologies are on their way into the organisations although it has to be  admitted that “User Activity Monitoring” is a downright inadequate name for such an essential security mechanism. Other than it suggests, it is not meant to implement a fully comprehensive, corporate-wide, personalized user surveillance layer. Every solution that aims at identifying undesirable behaviour in real-time needs to satisfy the high standards of requirements as imposed by many accepted laws and standards, including data protection regulations, labour law and the general respect for user privacy.

Nevertheless, the deployment of such a solution is possible and often necessary. To achieve this, such a solution needs to be strategically well-designed from the technical, the legal and an organisational point of view. All relevant stakeholders from business to IT and from legal department to the workers’ council need to be involved from day one of such a project. A typical approach means that all users are pseudonymized and all information is processed on basis of Information that cannot be traced back to actual user IDs. Outlier behaviour and inadequate changes in access patterns can be identified with looking at an individual user.  The outbreak of a malware infection or a privileged account being taken over can usually be identified without looking at the individual user.  And in the rare case of the de-pseudonymization of a user being required, there have to be adequate processes in place. This might include the four eyes principle for actual de-cloaking and the involvement of the legal department, the workers’ council and/or a lawyer.

Targeted access analytics algorithms can nowadays assist in the identification of security issues. Thus they can help organisations in getting to know their employees, especially their privileged business users and administrators. By correlating this information with other data sources, for example threat intelligence data and real-time security intelligence (RTSI) this might act as the basis for the identification of Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) traversing a corporate network infrastructure from the perimeter through the use of account information and the actual access to applications.

KYE will be getting as important as KYC but for different reasons. Both rely on intelligent analytics algorithms and a clever design of infrastructure, technology and processes.  They both transform big data technology, automation and a well-executed approach towards business and security into essential solutions for sustainability, improved business processes and adequate compliance.  We expect that organisations leveraging existing information and modern technology by operationalising both for constant improvement of security and the core business can draw substantial competitive advantages from that.

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