The pandemic radically transformed the business landscape across the world and the way organizations perceive work. It clearly established that a remote workforce could actually be productive and more. However, were these businesses prepared for such a drastic digital shift within such a short span of time? No.
With the advent of remote working and the move to everything digital, identity is the new perimeter and an identity centric approach is the only way to achieve holistic cybersecurity. Identities are the digital representation of employees, machines, applications, and workloads in any organization.
Numbers illustrate the urgency of the situation as well – According to a report, Google has registered over 2 million phishing sites as of January 2021, up from 1.7 million in 2020. According to Cybersecurity Ventures, the cost of cybercrime in the world will reach $6 trillion annually by 2021. These are just numbers when you are reading them, but you can become a part of the statistic if identity security is not treated with the importance that it needs.
What is Identity Security?
Identity Security is ensuring the identities of individuals, applications, workloads, and other elements in an organization are secured with tools that are equipped to handle the advanced threats of today.
Identity and Access Management is a tool primarily perceived as a tool that helps align processes in an organization whereas in reality, it can be the holistic security your identities need. It ensures that every association and interaction of identities with applications internally and externally are protected, monitored, and secured seamlessly.
How Can You Achieve Identity Security?
Identity security can be achieved by focusing on providing end-to-end security with intelligent new-age IAM tools. Ilantus has one such IAM platform called Compact Identity which is a Converged IAM solution – this means all your identity needs can be found in one single solution. This ensures holistic security but also provides everything an organization needs to be secure with one solution.
Here are some ways:
- Zero-trust Security with IAM: Zero trust network security model abides by the philosophy of “Never Trust, Always Verify”. This is absolutely necessary to manage the advanced threats of today. With the rise in phishing attempts combined with the increasing number of hack attacks, verifying access smartly is essential. With zero trust, users are granted access only after they verify their identities in multiple ways and only to applications that they might need to execute their work. It also ensures every additional access goes through a stringent set of authentication processes and approval policies to avoid taking advantage of practices like shadow IT.
- Role-Based Access Control: While zero trust is the crux of network philosophy that can help achieve security with perimeters, RBAC is the tool that ensures its execution. Role-based access control helps in efficiency as well as the effectiveness of security. It provides access to users and devices based on their role that is predefined with a collaborative approach by admins, managers, and HR. Once these accesses are defined, whenever a user joins an organization, they are by default equipped with few birthright accesses and every approval also follows the policy.
- Privileged Access Management: According to a Verizon report, 40% of organizations aren’t even aware of the number of privileged accounts in their network. Privileged users hold access to sensitive applications in an organization. Their accesses are important to maintain security but also important to hackers as an easy way to cause trouble. Thus, ensuring these are handled in a secure and automated manner is important to security. This can only be achieved by an efficient privileged access management solution that automates, monitors, and provides end-to-end privileged account security. You can understand PAM in detail here.
- Identity Analytics: An intelligent solution that crunches valuable information about the company, its processes, and actions to provide data-driven insights to decision-makers. Built on machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies, it helps sift through large amounts of organizational data in a short period while recognizing dangerous patterns that might be threat-inducing. Here is a blog that addresses how identity analytics can radically improve your security posture.
Identity security is imperative in cybersecurity. For organizations, security cannot be complete without having identity at the center of all decisions. When security solutions like a firewall that once served their purpose are no longer sufficient to sustain security independently, IAM acts as the missing piece of security.
