The ongoing expansion of IAM (Identity and Access Management) tools and infrastructure needed to manage access to cloud and on-premises assets in today’s hybrid enterprises is leading to a significant increase in accounts, credentials, roles, and access paths. Identity-based threats are clearly on the rise and are difficult to detect as they are exposing significant gaps in day-to-day security operations.
Many businesses are vulnerable to attacks that bypass traditional defenses and use valid credentials to simply log in and gain unauthorized access to sensitive data and entire network systems. This type of hacking can be devastating to companies that find themselves forced to recover and rebuild from complex attacks.
This is where comprehensive identity observability comes into play, as it enables real-time contextual monitoring and analysis of all identity-related activities, human and non-human, and access paths. Not only does identity observability provide identity and security teams with crucial context into what is happening within the identity infrastructure, why it is happening, and how it can be managed, but it also provides an in-depth analysis of surrounding patterns and risky identity behaviors in real time.
The difficulty of detecting identity-based threats arises from the lack of context into activities that, on their own, may appear legitimate. Yet in the context of other events over time, they are clearly not. That’s why a continual look at identity activities in the context of the time they took place significantly extends the value of identity observability and identity protection, offering insights into the dynamic nature of identity risks. By introducing a temporal context into identity observability, many more of these dangerous threats can be discovered and mitigated before notable damage takes place.
Role of time-based context in enhancing identity observability
The challenges of identity management and hygiene are only increasing as the identity fabric is becoming more complex. Analyzing a single identity activity, at a single point in time, does not provide enough information to determine if it is legitimate or not. It has to be analyzed in the context of other activities that took place just before, in parallel, and just after that activity, to understand if it was part of a threat pattern. This is why time-based analysis becomes essential to security operations by enabling retrospective analysis of identity activity for both human and non-human identities, posture changes, trends, and outliers over time, like fluctuations in identity creation.
By opting to enhance threat detection through observability and time-based contextualization, security teams can better analyze threats. Additionally, by enabling monitoring of identity activity trends and changes, security teams can better understand how to respond to cyber risk and threat patterns across the identity infrastructure.
Enhancing organizational security through identity observability can better allow organizations to protect against identity-related threats effectively and efficiently. Some of the most important capabilities include:
- Strengthened Identity Visibility: Detect and review all identities, assets, and identity systems over time.
- Improved Identity Hygiene: Understand identity posture trends, detect stale identities that should be removed, identify accesses that bypass security controls like MFA or PAM, and more.
- Detection of Risky Activity: Identify suspicious activity patterns like credential misuse, or conflicting or impossible access patterns.
- Fast Incident Response: Investigate identity activities for potentially compromised human or machine identities with swift precision.
Going beyond monitoring known managed identities and assets and analyzing their activities over time can provide crucial insights and support to businesses looking to reduce identity-related risk and enhance their security posture. With added observability and time-based context, organizations can be better prepared to address any potential vulnerabilities and maintain more robust identity-related security.
It’s clear that stationary views of identity security are no longer helpful. Historical context and dynamic time-based analysis unlock extensive operational value for identity observability and elevate the effectiveness of identity protection efforts.
