The hidden challenges of business partner access: How to stay secure and agile at scale

If you're an IT or security professional, you're no stranger to the constant flow of requests, new users, and systems to manage.

This challenge has compounded in today’s fast-paced digital economy as businesses rely heavily on collaboration with external partners. Whether it’s resellers, distributors, or third-party vendors, these relationships are essential for business growth and success. However, as these partnerships expand in quantity and scale, so do the risks.

Cybercriminals are targeting third-party identities, leading to breaches that, on average, take longer to identify and contain and can cost organizations millions. As organizations grow, managing partner identities and access becomes complex and resource-intensive, often creating inefficiencies and security gaps. Gartner has raised the alarm that “only 39% of companies say that the data they exchange with strategic partners or third parties is adequately protected by their cybersecurity strategy.”

The stakes are too high for businesses to continue relying on outdated and manual processes not built to handle the unique needs of business partner access.

The growing challenge of managing partner access

But why is this harder than it looks? As your business grows and you collaborate with more partners, the number of users who need access to your systems and data also increases. Managing this level of access while keeping sensitive user data secure becomes increasingly complex, especially when dealing with third-party organizations with their own identity infrastructure and access controls. 

For example, you’re in the manufacturing sector and rely on a network of authorized distributors to sell your products. Alternatively, you might depend on the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) sector to deliver ships or unmanned systems. In any case, these distributors require access to a subset of your internal resources—such as product catalogs, pricing information, and fulfillment reports.

This leads to a critical question: How do you securely and efficiently onboard these partner users without overburdening your IT team?

Introducing Secure Partner Access

Many organizations still use traditional Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions that aren’t designed to handle external partners at scale. These legacy systems tend to rely on manual processes and complex multi-tenancy architecture that are prone to errors and are costly in terms of time and resources required.

This is where Okta’s Secure Partner Access solution comes into play, which is now authorized at the FedRAMP High level and DoD Impact Level 4. Specifically designed to tackle the complexities of managing business partner access, it provides a secure and scalable solution that adapts to the demands of your growing partner ecosystem.

Here’s how it works:

• Centralize user management to enhance visibility and control: View all partner users and policies in one place while keeping user populations separate within a single tenant. This is made possible with “Realms,” which provides secure boundaries for different partner organizations within your user directory and prevents leakage of sensitive user data across partners. It also reduces reliance on “hub and spoke” architecture and eliminates complex deployment models that require duplicative setup and ongoing management across multiple tenants.

• Accelerate partner onboarding and offboarding: Realm assignments allow you to quickly onboard new partner users from external identity sources into pre-configured user populations to automatically create users (via JIT provisioning) and assign apps. Partner users can then leverage their existing corporate credentials to access shared applications. Consolidating all partner identity management through a central control plane reduces the risk of duplicate user-profiles and lingering access caused by manual errors. 
• Do more with less using delegated admin controls: Enhance security and free up valuable IT resources by delegating least-privilege admin rights to external partners. This allows you to reduce the administrative burden of day-to-day operations–such as creating a new user or resetting a password–while maintaining control over global access and session policies.
• Provide partner admins with a dedicated admin portal: An out-of-the-box portal allows them to seamlessly manage users, group membership, and app assignments across their user base. This also helps ensure that partner admins only have visibility into the users they are authorized to manage, reducing risk and limiting exposure.
   

Okta also provides APIs to further automate the management of Realms and Realm assignments. For Okta Identity Governance customers, Secure Partner Access provides increased observability into partner access, such as the ability to run access certification campaigns on Realm users. Customers can also leverage Okta Workflows to easily generate reports on all Realms within their organizations, providing clear insights into user distribution for improved observability.

Key takeaways

Managing business partner access doesn’t have to be a constant headache. With Secure Partner Access, you can improve your organization’s ability to support secure, scalable partner access to shared resources while reducing the administrative burden on your IT team as your partner network grows.

By centralizing access management, enforcing least-privilege access, and delegating day-to-day responsibilities to partner admins, you can streamline processes across various partner organizations while minimizing the risk of a breach.

So, the next time you find yourself buried in password reset requests from your external partners, remember that Okta can help you confidently manage partner access without adding unnecessary administrative work for your IT team.

To learn more about Secure Partner Access, contact us to schedule a demo or visit the Product Hub Page in the Okta Help Center.