Identity Security Maturity Model for Building toward "Agile Access"
It’s no secret that the world of identity is changing. The explosion in non-human identities (NHI) and machine identities, the Generative AI movement, increase in AI apps and enterprises accelerating adoption of SaaaS, and expansion to the cloud is requiring organizations to take a fresh approach to answering cybersecurity’s most challenging question: “Who can take what action on what data?”
Organizations aim to follow the principle of least privilege, ensuring all identities have only the minimum access needed to do their jobs. However, achieving this has historically been challenging (impossible, even) as most companies have excessive unused permissions that they cannot visualize and, therefore, clean up. To make matters worse, security and governance teams have traditionally taken full responsibility for managing access. However, many modern organizations are recognizing that access must be a team sport.?
Centralized governance for identity is impractical, leaving security and governance teams to approve access without fully understanding what’s necessary. This leads to over-provisioned access that is often too broad, undermining the organization’s ability to reach least privilege.
As cloud infrastructure and AI applications proliferate, organizations face new challenges in managing identity and access, with more identity silos emerging across different platforms.?
This shift calls for a new, agile approach to managing access. Veza’s Co-Founder & CEO, Tarun Thakur, believes the answer may lie with Generative AI. Thakur is confident that the future of identity includes attainable least privilege for companies at scale. In his recent article on behalf of the #Forbes Technology Council, he described how “agile access” hinges on understanding permissions data scattered across numerous systems, including directories, SSO tools, and cloud platforms.?
“As identity-based attacks continue to disrupt enterprises and the broader economy, companies will be driven to modernize their identity infrastructure—cybersecurity strategy will demand it. To do this, they must adopt the principle of least privilege as their guiding standard and seek identity tools that fully understand permissions.” - Tarun Thakur (Co-Founder & CEO, Veza)
He explains how traditional identity tools (that are designed around rigid tree structures) fall short in representing complex permission dependencies, which leads to limited visibility. AI could play a transformative role in scaling access control, analyzing permissions data across systems and helping to identify the right entitlements. Read the full article to learn how Thakur believes identity tools should evolve beyond hierarchical structures, enabling both security and business teams to assess and manage access accurately. → Read now!?
The 5 Critical Pillars of Identity Security Maturity?
Modern identity security is all about managing access permissions and entitlements - the purest form of identity. As organizations rush towards identity transformation initiatives, we believe solving the access problem and achieving least privilege requires that each pillar be incorporated into your security strategy:?
领英推荐
The journey toward mature identity security follows a clear progression, beginning with fundamental access visibility capabilities that create the foundation for all future security controls. This initial phase (maturity level 1) focuses on comprehensive access mapping, identifying high-risk permission combinations, and establishing access risk dashboards that provide actionable insights. As organizations progress, they layer on intelligence and analytics (maturity phase 2) capabilities, incorporating cross-platform correlation, behavioral analytics, and intelligent role optimization to transform raw visibility into meaningful patterns and predictions.
The middle stages of maturity introduce robust access monitoring (maturity phase 3), access orchestration (maturity phase 4), and enterprise access workflow (maturity phase 5) capabilities. Organizations implement continuous compliance monitoring, automated incident response, and privilege elevation alerts, while simultaneously developing structured workflows for core business processes of access requests, user access reviews, and automated provisioning/deprovisioning. These capabilities work in concert to streamline identity operations while maintaining security rigor of the principle of least privilege. The monitoring and workflow phases are particularly critical as they bridge the gap between passive observation and active management.
The pinnacle of identity security maturity manifests in the implementation of dynamic, risk-aware controls with automation, natural language search capabilities, and APIs. At this advanced stage, organizations can confidently implement just-in-time access, privileged access assurance, and compliance controls that adapt to changing risk conditions. What distinguishes truly mature programs is their ability to maintain these sophisticated controls while optimizing both user experience and operational efficiency - ensuring that security enhances rather than hinders business operations. This final phase represents the realization of least privilege at scale, where access is both secure and seamless.
The future of identity security lies in using next-generation enterprise identity platform for all five pillars, enabling organizations to meet their critical identity security use cases of - identity threat detection (ITDR), SaaS Security, PAM for Cloud, PAM for SaaS apps, next-gen IGA, Non-Human Identity (NHI) security. Ultimately the goal is to achieve a model of Just-In-Time (JIT) Access where automation is leveraged to grant permissions on-demand and automatically revoked unused entitlements – as we like to say, all residual access needs to go away. Automation and Gen AI-powered solutions will also continuously monitor and remediate access creep and SoD violations, leading to a future where organizations are constantly reducing their identity attack without sacrificing operational efficiency.?
The Rise of Non-Human Identities
With the recent explosion of non-human identities (NHIs), automated and AI-driven solutions are more critical than ever. Just like human identities, NHIs have permissions data, too, and they are often highly privileged, making NHIs the largest and fastest-growing part of the identity attack surface. In the recent NHI Summit 2024 (sponsored by Veza, AWS, HashiCorp and Aembit), fifteen incredible speakers covered strategies for securing NHIs within your organization. This 3 hour virtual conference, featuring an amazing lineup of speakers, is now available on-demand. Watch now!
Want more identity related content??
Great dad | Inspired Risk Management and Security | Cybersecurity | AI Governance & Security | Data Science & Analytics My posts and comments are my personal views and perspectives but not those of my employer
2 个月Veza insightful. Thanks for sharing the 5 Critical Pillars of Identity Security Maturity