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Account Management Transcription

Welcome to our account management module. Account management systems can provide us with a wide range of features. They can provide a central location, where we can manage our user access to multiple systems at once, allow us to easily monitor changes to our user accounts and computer accounts and groups.

And allow us to make an easy way for our employees to submit requests to change credentials or terminate access to systems, and also provide automatic replication of data between multiple systems and provide automated account management based on policies. Account management systems use a central user account repository, such as LDAP, which stands for lightweight directory access protocol.

We have several types of centralized directory management services. The X.500 standard is a standard that defines electronic directory services. LDAP, or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, is a universal standard which is used to exchange directory services information between a variety of systems. Microsoft Windows Server is probably the most popular server operating system in use today.

And it has its own built in central directory management system, known as Active Directory. This system is responsible for controlling users, and access to resources. And finally, Unix based systems have what's called Apache directory services, which provides a similar functionality to Microsoft's active directory. The most common type of authentication mechanism is a password.

This is a form of what you know authentication because the user knows what their password is. We need to make sure that we have appropriate password policies to make sure that we are protecting our data and ensuring that we do not have unauthorized access to our systems. It is very important to provide appropriate education for your users and make sure that you're controlling their passwords appropriately.

You should make sure that your users are using secure passwords with increased complexity, such as using uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols. Make sure that the password is of a significant length. Most systems require at least an eight character password, but some security experts are recommending a minimum of 15 character passwords.

You also wanna make sure that passwords are changed frequently. Depending on the sensitivity of your system, this could be once a month, or once a year. Users should make sure to use a different password for each system that they access. There should be a lock out threshold so that if someone is attempting a dictionary attack or brute force attack, it locks out the user's account after a certain number of incorrect login attempts. And finally, there should be controls in place to make sure that the user's password changes and resets of their passwords are controlled to make sure that only the authorized user is able to make these changes. A profile is a collection of information about your users or perhaps a group that users belong to.

A profile can contain a wide variety of information, such as the user's name, address, birthday, social security number and other personally identifiable information. It might include their username and password, and also information about the privileges and rights that they have on your systems. The profile change process should be automated if possible.

For example, when you hire a new employee, and they're added into the HR system, a profile should automatically be generated for them in your profile management system. When an employee is terminated from the company in the HR system, their access to the systems should be automatically revoked. And you should allow your users to manage the parts of their profile that you do not consider sensitive.

For example, you would not want a user going into the system and modifying their social security number without providing documentation to your HR department. Because this could cause problems with tax forms and other financial transactions. However, if an employee moves to a new address, they should be able to very easily go into the system and update their new address without having to contact the HR department.

This concludes our account management module. Thank you for watching.