Identity Security: Why is it Important?

In today’s digital world, you can’t do business without technology and you can’t use technology without identity security. Identity security protects against the cyber threats associated with providing technology access to a diverse workforce. It does this by enabling the management and governance of access for every digital identity within an organization. With the rapid growth of technology in the cloud enterprise, it’s imperative to protect your business against the potential cyber risks that target digital identities.

What is Identity Security?

Identity Security is a comprehensive solution for securing all identities used in an organization. It assumes that any identity – whether IT admin, remote worker, third-party vendor, device, or application – can become privileged under certain conditions, creating an attack path to an organization’s most valuable assets. That is why an Identity Security approach, built on a foundation of privileged access management, secures all identities – human or machine – throughout the cycle of accessing critical assets.

A comprehensive Identity Security approach includes authenticating every identity accurately, authorizing each identity with the proper permissions, and providing access for that identity to privileged assets in a structured manner – all in a way that can be audited (or accounted for) to ensure the entire process is sound. It should also enable organizations to secure access across any device, anywhere, at just the right time – so they don’t have to choose between security and productivity.

Why should you care about it?

As defined corporate networks wane in prevalence, the need for strong identity security becomes more important. If your enterprise identity is compromised, it can be used to commit cybercrime, fraud, or intellectual property theft. In addition, if an attacker gains access to a corporate account, they can potentially wreak havoc on the organization. Additionally, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires organizations to take steps to protect the personal data of EU citizens. This includes ensuring that only authorized individuals have access to this information. Failing to comply with the GDPR can result in hefty fines.

Identity security is a crucial aspect of the digital age. You should care about it because you will run into problems if you don’t implement it into your own cybersecurity processes.

How do organizations use Identity Security?

There are a number of different ways that organizations can use identity security. These include:

• Implementing strong authentication measures: One way to improve identity security is to implement strong authentication measures that require users to provide more than one type of credential when they log in. (For example both a password and a fingerprint)
• Using biometrics: Another way to improve is to use biometrics. This involves using physical characteristics, such as fingerprints or iris scans, to verify someone’s identity.
• Managing access control: This involves controlling who has access to sensitive information and systems. Access control can be managed through things like user permissions and role-based access control.
• Enhancing security awareness: Last but not least, another way to help prevent identity theft and other security threats is to enhance security awareness. This includes educating employees about best practices for keeping their personal information safe, as well as teaching them how to spot phishing emails and other types of attacks.

Identity Security for the Cloud Enterprise

A strong identity security solution helps your organization enable access while securing business—everywhere, which includes hybrid and multi-cloud environments, remote work, multiple devices, and more. Organizations have found that identity security provides multiple layers of business value such as reducing risk, automating IT processes, as well as enhancing the worker experience.

It achieves these above-mentioned results by properly provisioning access, protecting your business at scale, and ensuring compliance.

Provision with confidence

By embracing a strong identity security solution, you’ll be able to use AI and ML technology to properly provision and deliver the right access to the right users at the onset of the onboarding process and throughout a user’s lifecycle as they move roles or leave the organization. Identity security enables you to manage and govern accounts, roles, and entitlements for all applications, systems, data, and cloud services, all while maintaining the same level of consistency and visibility across the entire organization. This makes it easy to identify risks, monitor behaviors and refine roles.

Protect at scale

Ensuring your business maintains operability while managing security is critical when scaling a cloud enterprise. How can you ensure your organization can manage millions of identities and access points while mitigating risk? Identity security uses deep analytics and machine learning to detect and identify risks, separate duties (SoD) to enforce security controls, and build and enforce custom access policies. Building these policies in turn helps meet compliance needs while maintaining operational efficiencies. With identity security at the helm, you can manage users, requests, and entitlements at high volumes, no matter where you are – without worry.

Comply with certainty

By governing user access, tracking usage, and enforcing policy controls for all users, apps, and data, you’ll be able to demonstrate compliance with auditors. Identity security ensures regulatory compliance by providing transparency into every digital identity in the enterprise. This includes their attributes, entitlements, and even access history. With a good identity security solution, you’ll be able to use AI and ML to certify users quickly, maintain audit trails of accounts, entitlements, policies, and actions, and manage policies throughout the user lifecycle.

Conclusion

Identity security is critical to protecting your organization moving forward. As the security perimeter dissolves, the function of on-prem infrastructure is moved to the cloud, and traditional work practices are replaced with remote access and home offices, securing accounts and identities becomes paramount to safe business operations.