Identity: A New Battlefield of Cybersecurity

The rapid adoption of cloud services, SaaS applications, and the transition to remote work has fundamentally reshaped the behavior of businesses. These technological advances have created a world of opportunity, but they have also brought complexities that pose serious security threats. At the heart of these vulnerabilities are the gateway to enterprise security and the number one attack vector for bad actors.

Examining the importance of modernizing identity strategies and the benefits of centralizing identity within the security ecosystem to protect your organization from costly breaches while increasing operational efficiency.

The rise of fragmented technology stacks

The days when companies relied on a single solution related to comprehensive licensing agreements are over. Today’s businesses choose “in-breeding” solutions that prioritize agility and performance, combining fragmented technology ecosystems. These advanced technology stacks offer flexibility, but also create major challenges for security teams.

All the apps, platforms, and infrastructure components you add increase the overall complexity of your ecosystem. This fragmentation distributes resources and identities across the disconnected silos, limiting vision, and making it easier for cybercriminals to identify and exploit security blind spots. For modern business, unmanaged identity is not just a weakness, it is the heels of Achilles in enterprise security.

Increased Threat of Identity-Based Attacks

Why is your identity a new prime target? The 2024 Verizon Data Breach Report found that 80% of violations contain compromising identity credentials. With an average time to detect and contain 290 days of violations, it is clear that many organizations are underprepared for these increasingly sophisticated threats. Although we were surprised by the rapid pace of cloud and sarth adoption, many companies still lack the unified visibility and control needed to protect their systems and effectively mitigate risk.

Rather than acting as a passive gatekeeper, identity must be the basis for a proactive, defense-first enterprise security strategy.

Centralize identity within the security ecosystem

To combat modern threats, businesses need to rethink their approach to identity. Centralizing identity across all systems and applications can significantly reduce security gaps, create real-time insights, and allow for faster responses to potential attacks. It’s more than just authentication. It’s about transforming how organizations use their identity as a robust security tool.

Modern cloud-native identity solutions enhance your business by providing three key features.

1. Comprehensive Visibility

Visibility is important when fighting the blind spots of fragmented technology stacks. A centralized identity platform provides unified, real-time insight into the entire ecosystem and helps security teams surface vulnerabilities before they are exploited. By consolidating all your identity and access data into one platform, businesses can identify risks faster and prioritize remediation.

Ask yourself, can you solve your identity?

□Get visibility into all threats across all systems, devices, types and customer accounts?

□Do you incorporate third-party signals (in addition to first-party signals from identity providers) from across your high-tech stack for comprehensive, real-time threat visibility?

□ Do you want to run automatic scans of all tools and evaluate the setup against an aggregated set of Zero Trust frameworks?

2. Powerful orchestration

Centralized identity solutions not only expose risks, but also help eliminate them. Automation allows for aggressive repairs during potential violations and allows access to be automatically revoked by flagging abnormal behavior. This type of orchestration promotes incident response and is scalable and efficient in complex environments.

Checklist: Can you solve your identity?

□Would you like to simplify the task of setting up automatic repair actions?

□Are you able to enable detailed customization of remediation actions based on risk factors, policies, and other contextual queues?

□Triggers a robust response like universal logout to protect against potential violations?

3. Wide and deep integration

Modern identity platforms connect seamlessly with existing technology stacks via APIs, unlocking the full value of system-wide security features. Whether you connect cloud services, SaaS applications, or legacy systems, these integrations create a consistent, secure user experience while closing security gaps.

Checklist: Can you solve your identity?

□Integrate seamlessly with major enterprise SaaS applications. For example, CRM,

Productivity, collaboration, ERP, and IT OPS management apps?

□Does it provide deep identity security features beyond simple provisioning and single sign-on, and beyond single sign-on to protect those apps before, during and after logging in?

□Would you integrate it with the core parts of your security stack to enhance risk monitoring, threat detection and remediation?

Path to Identity First Security

Identity First Security creates an open, efficient and secure ecosystem for managing your apps and systems without silos, custom integrations, or security gaps. The OpenID Foundation’s Ipsie Working Group is working to make this vision come to fruition.

Take the next step

Your company’s success depends on its ability to adapt and thrive in an evolving security environment. By shifting your mindset and setting your identity to the foundation of your cybersecurity strategy, your organization can achieve stronger protection, operational efficiency and a seamless user experience.

It’s time to stop playing defense and start innovating security around identity. Start with modern cloud-based identity solutions that ensure that your system is ahead of the threats it faces every day. Find out how centralized identities can transform today’s security ecosystem.