The Future of Identity Security: A Unified Identity Platform

In today's digital age, managing access to sensitive information and systems is crucial. With cyber threats becoming more sophisticated and frequent, it is more vital than ever to have robust security measures in place to protect against data breaches and cyber attacks. In this article I'm going to address the challenges of today's Identity Security landscape and lay a path for the future of Identity Management.

The security landscape is constantly evolving. Maintaining a competitive advantage requires optimizing for efficiency, accessibility, and cost savings. The traditional office and infrastructure are disappearing. Hyper-dispersed organizations are here to stay which means you need to support work from anywhere initiatives. Cloud-first computing has accelerated so SaaS applications have become ubiquitous as you execute your digital transformation strategy.

Meanwhile, threat actors are attacking identity at scale. According to IBM's Cost of a Data Breach 2022 19% of all breaches globally were due to stolen or compromised credentials. At a whopping $9.44 million, data breaches in the US cost more than twice global average. The healthcare industry was hit the hardest for the 12th year in a row as they saw the average cost of a breach increase 42% since 2020.

The problem with identity security is that it's highly fragmented. People, applications, and data are all addressed separately. With a focus on hardening endpoints, there is significant friction in terms of processes. Many admins are forced to grant always-on privileges. This led to organizations scrambling to deploy individual point solutions which only addressed each challenge separately, and lacked true end-to-end protection.

The traditional perimeter has eroded. Identity is the new perimeter. Security executives need to shift from a fragmented to a unified approach to identity security. One where people, applications, and data are all aligned as one. This is the unified identity strategy that allows you to verify everything.

Organizations need a tool that can combine Identity & Access Management (IAM), Privileged Access Management (PAM), and Identity Governance & Administration (IGA) solutions into one platform.

IAM solutions manage access to non-privileged resources and systems by ensuring users have the appropriate permissions to access the tools they need to do their jobs, while also enforcing policies that prevent unauthorized access. This enables you to manage employee apps without logging into each app as an administrator. It also empowers you to manage a range of identities including people, software, and hardware like robotics and IoT devices.

PAM is an information security mechanism that safeguards identities with special access or capabilities beyond regular users. PAM solutions provide granular control over privileged access, enforcing policies that limit the scope of access and monitor user activity. It involves creating and managing privileged accounts for administrators, developers, and other users who require access to sensitive resources.

IGA enables security administrators to efficiently manage user identities and access across the enterprise. It improves their visibility into identities and access privileges and helps them implement the necessary controls to prevent inappropriate or risky access. Governance is about visibility, segregation of duties, role management, attestation, analytics and reporting. Administration is related to account administration, credentials administration, user and device provisioning and managing entitlements.

According to Gartner? Research, “By 2025, 70% of new access management, governance, administration and privileged access deployments will be converged identity and access management platforms.”

The right Unified Identity Platform combines IAM, PAM, and IGA solutions and provides customers with a tool they can deploy that helps address all aspects of Identity Security. A unified identity platform that leverages the three main pillars of identity security provides many benefits such as:

1. Accelerated time to value: Pre-integrated solutions that are validated, tested, and supported provides deeper integrations and allows customers to benefit from less customization, requiring less custom code.
2. Lower TCO: Reduced operational and upgrade risk with a single platform that demonstrates validated upgrade paths with consolidated teams and skills.
3. Streamlined support: Consolidating vendors to a single point of accountability helps customers avoid the vendor blame game - no more finger pointing. There is a quicker turnaround for support cases.
4. Greater visibility and control across the enterprise: Consolidation and aggregation of information and knowledge across systems and teams leads to more intelligent decisions. It reduces and eliminates unnecessary vulnerabilities. There are no silos to wade through and offers a consistent toolset.

Your path to zero trust becomes clearer when you can deploy a unified identity platform that provides seamless management of business users, privileged users, secure access to internal assets, as well as governance and administration across your entire organization.

A unified identity platform helps unify your identity security approach to managing access rights for better visibility and control, verifies everything before granting access to assets, and helps adapt to the ever-evolving threat landscape.

Whether you're looking to secure workforce and customer identities, manage privileged access, or provide governance and administration for your organization, a unified identity platform can help you solve today's challenges now, and be ready for what comes next.

I help customers strengthen operational efficiency, reduce risk surface, control costs and enhance their cybersecurity. The right Unified Identity Platform brings together best-in-class software to enable organizations to shift from a fragmented identity strategy to a holistic approach. Contact me to learn more.