Rohan Vaidya, CyberArk's Vice President, India and SAARC Region, Discusses Security-First Identity Strategies
In today's digital environment, cybersecurity is a business imperative. Once trust is lost, it's never regained. There are countless examples of organizations that have been breached and lost their leadership positions.
Identity security – ensuring the right individuals have access to the right resources at the right time – is at the core of maintaining a strong cybersecurity posture, so implementing intelligent privilege controls is a critical step for any identity-centric strategy.
The number of cyber attacks faced by Indian organizations is increasing every year. The survey revealed that all Indian organizations are expecting identity-related breaches. A huge 84% are anticipating these breaches as part of digital transformation initiatives such as cloud migration and legacy app migration. This wave is also raising growing concerns about insider threats fuelled by factors such as exploitable leftover credentials and disgruntled ex-employees.
Neglecting identity security can have serious consequences, including data leaks, loss of customer trust, and financial penalties. Even seemingly innocuous scenarios, such as an employee having excessive access rights, can lead to data theft or vandalism.
Identity security goes beyond authentication and authorization to include visibility, governance and compliance, underscoring the need for robust identity and access management (IAM) practices to mitigate cyber risk and reflecting the industry's commitment to prioritizing identity security as the foundation of cyber resilience.
Why identity is key to security
Identity is at the core of cybersecurity, distinguishing legitimate from malicious behavior. Identity is how organizations identify and regulate access to resources and ensure privileges match roles and responsibilities. Identity enables organizations to monitor and audit users, devices, applications, activities, and behaviors, and effectively detect and respond to anomalies and incidents.
Identity security reveals critical insights, including who has access to data, why they have access, and how they are using it. Without identity security, security policies and compliance are difficult to enforce and organizations are unable to hold users accountable. Identity security is critical as digital transformation, cloud migration, remote work, and the proliferation of mobile devices increase identity-related complexity, attack surface, and risk of breach.
Cultivating identity as the key to security
Establishing identity as a security enabler requires adopting a comprehensive identity security framework that:
- Identity Lifecycle Management:
- Creating, provisioning, updating, and deprovisioning identities and access based on roles and responsibilities.
- Ensure accuracy, currency, and compliance with organizational policies and regulations.
- Identity and Access Management (IAM):
- Validate and verify identity and access privileges based on context, behavior, and risk level.
- Enforce granular and dynamic access policies, including least privilege, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and conditional access.
- Privacy and Intelligence:
- Detect and prevent threats that target identity and access privileges.
- Analyze data insights and apply advanced analytics, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and respond to risks.
The benefits of prioritizing identity security
Implementing an identity security framework provides significant benefits, including:
- Enhanced security posture: Reduce your attack surface and potential breaches, and improve visibility and control over your data and systems.
- Improved compliance and governanceEnsure compliance with security and privacy regulations, accountability, transparency, and evidence of compliance.
- Increased productivity and efficiency: Streamlining identity security processes, automating workflows, and optimizing resource allocation.
- Enhanced User Experience: Provide seamless, secure access and empower users with self-service capabilities.
Identity security is the foundation of a robust cybersecurity strategy and is essential for effectively managing controls and policies. Research shows that organizations with robust identity security strategies outperform their peers in cybersecurity effectiveness.
As organizations expand their cloud footprint and face a diverse range of endpoints, it is essential to prioritize identity security. Allocating resources to protect access to both human and machine identities strengthens your security posture, minimizes disruptions, and advances critical initiatives. This is important because research shows that machine identities are 45 times larger than human identities. As more bots are deployed in the enterprise, they must be managed with a robust identity security strategy to prevent misuse. Partnering with identity security experts streamlines processes, accelerates growth, strengthens defenses, and positions your organization to thrive in a competitive cybersecurity environment.
