The rapid digital shift brought about by the pandemic has triggered seismic changes across the cybersecurity ecosystem. Today’s world has ushered in an era where companies require more tools, applications, accesses, and connections. Additionally, many variables such as mergers and acquisitions, periodic staff changes, and increasing cloud adoption have only compounded the difficulties of effectively and efficiently providing users with access to necessary and relevant data.

As a result, businesses face the difficult task of managing millions of identities, which may range from employees and contractors to machines, that connect to the vast number of access points with varying levels of access requirements that require vigilant management. To cope with such burdens, organizations have often relied solely on authenticating and federating access to workers, which also lack controls over who can access what without governance oversight. More concerningly, others still rely on manually granting access to resources, even though the sheer volume of identities makes it impossible to initiate constant monitoring, analytics, and risk-based assessments.

Against this backdrop, recent data by Verizon showed that 86 percent of online security breaches were associated with stolen credentials, with phishing, social engineering, and credential stuffing easily bypassing access management. Of more concern, almost 30 percent of the workforce identities and 40% of third-party identities remain ungoverned, further exacerbating cybersecurity vulnerabilities faced by organizations. With 9 out of 10 businesses reporting having experienced identity-related breaches, merely managing access is no longer sufficient to protect critical data and assets of organizations.

It is now of utmost importance that organizations implement a holistic identity security solution that can comprehensively manage identities; one that offers complete visibility and intelligence to assess each identity’s access rights and whether they are used to access the right resources. Such an approach allows organizations to determine who has access to which resources, identifying the user’s location, job function, user role, and devices used to make informed decisions regarding the access.

With a unified identity security approach leveraging advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and built on a unified platform, organizations can address every type of enterprise identity, and every type and location of data while managing risk. Consequently, with automation and intelligence, not only do enterprises get deep visibility and understanding of all user access and relationships, but all identity processes and decisions also become automated, greatly simplifying steps related to access requests, changes, and certifications, ensuring robust security by eliminating human error and making sure millions of identities can be efficiently managed to enhance productivity.

As a result, manual processes will be replaced with AI-driven workflows that can manage identities throughout their entire lifecycle by automatically provisioning, adjusting, and terminating access based on the users’ status. This enables a robust foundation in identity security that fits unique business needs by offering extensibility, flexibility, and configurability.

A unified identity security approach offers a single set of workflows for automation, one set of policies for control, a unified connectivity fabric, consistent APIs, and a unified data model. Therefore, organizations will gain unprecedented control, which allows them to secure all enterprise identities and address the current and evolving complexities of the modern enterprise.

The shift towards a unified identity security model will equip businesses with a deeper understanding of identity and access, complete visibility of access across hybrid environments, and a cohesive set of control policies to manage every type of identity and data – regardless of their location, or whether the accounts are privileged or non-privileged. Through a unified and comprehensive approach that delivers policy-based, just-in-time access to critical data and resources, organizations can adeptly navigate and mitigate risks across their entire operational spectrum, driving business acceleration.

SailPoint’s unified approach integrates with access management but includes more than application governance and provisioning, lifecycle management, certification, and password management. It provides rich additional context to enable smarter identity governance and management by working with other critical IT and security resources in an enterprise ecosystem.

Organizations must recognize that in the face of an ever-changing cybersecurity environment, they have to act fast. SailPoint’s report shows that strategies prioritizing identity security have saved organizations more than $3 million by preventing ransomware payment, and enterprises that leverage AI and ML for their identity processes are able to detect and respond to attacks 40 percent faster. Hence, a strong identity security program will enable companies to mitigate risks, enhance resilience, and safeguard trust and integrity.

#Cybersecurity #IdentitySecurity #ArtificialIntelligence #DataProtection #RiskManagement