Security challenges faced by enterprises have increased exponentially in both frequency and complexity; CIOs hope to rope in AI for helping mitigate attacks
Enterprises have increased the security budget in the past year, yet the number of security incidents has increased and cost companies trillions of dollars in damages. The direct attacks on corporate networks are not the only issue that has bothered the organizations; they had to organize work from home for the entire workforce. It expanded the scope of enterprise security to numerous private networks and homes.
The staff churn process has also multiplied as some furlough schemes required laying off the employees while new employees stated feeling new pressures. Organizations are being coerced into adapting faster and need solutions that can keep track of the changes in the uncertain situation.
CIOs acknowledge that returning to “business as usual” is not likely in the next few months. The constrained budgets across the board compound this. IT Security leaders are confused about how to handle modernizing security measures to help mitigate new dangers with limited or reduced resources.
Revitalizing the identity solution
Identity governance is one area of security that is often overlooked. Conventionally businesses invested in off-the-shelf or internally developed identity systems to help mitigate the growing business problems relevant to user access. These legacy platforms have, however, become hurdles in the current dynamic and remote-working world.
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Due to the remote work environment, users need and expect rapid and easy access to the application required to do the businesses and job, to ensure that the right personnel is accessing the relevant applications. Security-conscious enterprises require a solution to balance the need for emergency application access and reduce the associated risk with the process to the lowest level.
Present identity governance measures fail as they depend on static data. It means that dynamic data like entitlements and role profiles that change over time cannot be tracked by identity access. The issue has seen a drastic rise during the pandemic due to higher staff redundancies. IT teams are pushed to update furloughed employee’s privileges and access requests quickly.
CIOs point out that most identity governance systems are integrated with only a limited number of platforms like the organization’s HR system or the Microsoft Active Directory. This can cause poor user access visibility and inconsistent and non-textual access insights across the entire organization. Thus they are left with identity islands spread across the organization.
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AI’s role in providing a solution
CIOs feel that when faced with obsolete measures, AI-based identity analytics may be the best solution. When the tool pulls in data from the entire business and the access and identity management system, the AI-based identity analytics solution provides confidence metrics and scores to give an improved view and contextual insights of the user access risks. Companies can easily automate most of the access and governance decisions that are currently being manually handled.
Automation can reduce the burden that the process puts on the team and thus boosts cost and time savings. As the tool is dependent on the existing data, AI-based identity analytics uses all the existing data and solutions investments. It dynamically adapts to the evolving business requirements and technology. It also helps remove blind spots.
