State of Access 2024

The state of access in 2024 may surprise you.

Despite a plethora of resources and tools designed to make identity governance, management and protection possible, teams everywhere are struggling with the challenges of managing identity. The volume and complexity of permissions across hundreds of systems and thousands of users prohibits organizations from understanding the true reality of access. Most organizations struggle to confidently answer the question, “who can take what action on what data and resources?”

This is an identity problem.?

The sheer quantity of identities and their associated permissions creates a chasm between an organization’s current access state and their desired reality. Security teams know that the principle of least privilege is the best defense against identity attacks – however, identities span human and non-human alike, increasing the potential for blindspots and making least privilege difficult to achieve.

Regardless of these obstacles, organizations diligently march toward least privilege, anyway – and rightfully so. According to Gartner’s Top Trends in Cybersecurity 2023, 80% of organizations experienced an identity-related incident in the last 12 months. Given an accelerating trend in identity-related attacks over the last decade, this number is sure to rise in 2024 and beyond.

This acceleration, paired with the rise of AI-enabled identity threat vectors, supports our belief that it has never been more important to achieve least privilege, as elusive as it may seem. By leveraging modern identity solutions, security teams can make impactful progress toward this goal.?

But, how ought that progress be measured??

Traditionally, there have been few ways to measure progress in the world of identity and access. How are new tools, policy adjustments and team additions impacting your identity security posture? Are you getting closer to least privilege or falling further behind? Are you remaining stagnant?

Until Veza’s first State of Access report, it was nearly impossible to answer these questions because there were no benchmarks to look to.?

Veza’s State of Access 2024 report debuts the first set of identity and access benchmarks. Built on Veza’s dataset of 1.2 billion permissions, the report highlights critical data including:

• Average number of identity platforms (and which ones used most)
• Average number of roles and groups, per employee
• Ratio of non-human (service accounts) to human identities
• Average permissions associated with inactive and dormant users
• Average unused access in cloud systems like AWS and Snowflake

…and, more. Click here to get the full report, or watch our virtual presentation of the findings with cybersecurity leaders Mario Duarte (Former VP Security, Snowflake), Dr. Maohua Lu (Co-Founder & CTO, Veza) and Jason Garoutte (CMO, Veza). Click here to watch on-demand.

Want more identity security related content? Of course you do!?

Tune in to Veza’s Panel Discussion | Future of Identity Security on May 21, 2024 to hear security professionals Mike Towers (Chief Security & Trust Officer, Veza), Nicole Perlroth (Cybersecurity Reporter, Ballistic Ventures), Chetna Mahajan (CDIO, Amplitude) and Rich Dandliker (Chief Strategist, Veza) discuss what’s broken in identity today and how they predict modern technology may be able to fill the gaps. ?? RSVP here

Read the latest from Veza’s Chief Security & Trust Officer, Mike Towers, The Imperative for Identity Security: A Call to Action for the Industry

Download the Veza Ebook, coauthored by Phil Venables (Cybersecurity Leader) and Tarun Thakur (Co-Founder & CEO of Veza) – A Practitioner's Guide to Intelligent Access.