The role of identity at the center of a strong cybersecurity strategy has been cemented by the major shift to remote and hybrid working over the last two years. With numerous apps and services now housed in the cloud and accessed by a variety of identities at the office, on the road, remote space, or a combination of all of these, the traditional IT security perimeter no longer exists.
To ensure secure access to the new cloud-based and legacy on-premise applications, a transformation is needed in how enterprises deploy their IAM and Identity Governance initiatives. These trends, together with the rise of Identity-as-the-New-Perimeter and Zero Trust policies, have effectively put an end to the previous approach of relying on trusted users within the corporate perimeter, and thereby confirming Identity as the ultimate control plane.
Joseph Carson, Chief Security Scientist and Advisory CISO at ThycoticCentrify says, “The paradigm shift to working remotely has been accelerating and for years we have known that the traditional perimeter is no longer a reality. However, organizations have struggled to define the new perimeter. Factors such as cloud computing, home office networks, endpoints, mobile apps, and legacy on premise systems have further complicated the challenge. Some organizations have attempted to enforce multiple edge perimeter points though this becomes a major challenge to manage and secure.”
“We must look at all of these touch points to the organization and determine the unifying or common factor. For most organizations this is identity, one of the artifacts that organizations can still control, and this means access has become the new security control for the organization’s perimeter. In 2022, organizations will get back in control by making Identity and Access Security a top priority. Privileged access has become the digital polygraph test to verify identities are authentic before enabling authorization to resources,” he adds.
As the management of identity-related risk evolves, here are a few trends organizations should expect to see in 2022.
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Intelligent Unification
Intelligent unification will be a major trend in identity management in 2022. Organizations now, more than ever, have a wealth of solutions at their disposal. This might result in siloed data and a disjointed security approach, with some solutions focusing on specific use cases.
In order to reduce identity-related risk, it will be critical to maximize the capabilities and information available to give a comprehensive and unified view of identities, their access, and the reason why they have the access, and usage statistics revealing how they are utilizing the access. Eliminating silos and sharing information across these boundaries will help assure businesses and their IT leaders that their identities are truly secure, as well as more flexibility to deal with new identity issues as they occur.
Increased Cloud Adoption
In the coming year, SaaS and cloud services will continue to grow in popularity. Enterprises can now switch providers and scale up services they are employing with greater ease than ever before. However, this significantly increases the threat surface within enterprises when it comes to managing identity-related risk.
IAM and Identity Governance solutions must be able to provide a cloud native foundation with flexible configurability in order to keep up with this trend. This will enable businesses to safely scale up and down in response to demand, as well as manage their identities across an ever-increasing number of applications and services.
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Rising Autonomy
Throughout 2022, the level of autonomy in identity management processes will rise. Currently, identity management consists of a mix of manual and semi-autonomous tasks, which can result in significant overhead for administrators and end users. This manual effort is unsustainable, especially given the on-going shortage of IT and security professionals.
For quite some time, Identity Lifecycle Management and access provisioning have been automated to varied degrees. Recent advances have seen significant advancements in prescriptive analytics, which provides decision support for reviewers, end users, and approvers. True, some level of human decision-making or approval will always be required for the most important applications and sensitive data. However, as the amount of usable data stored on identities grows so will the automation of identity review, approval, and violation detection and remedy.
Intelligent unified governance platforms will emerge as a result of the union of increased identity analytics and flexible configurations and. Implementing, interacting and managing identity management processes will be substantially easier with such platforms.
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