Identity Observability: Why It’s Crucial for Identity Protection
The ever-expanding landscape of IAM (Identity and Access Management) tools and infrastructure, designed to manage access across cloud and on-premises environments, is creating a surge in the number of accounts, credentials, roles, and access paths that must be secured. Consequently, identity-based threats are surging, becoming increasingly difficult to detect because they often expose critical vulnerabilities in daily security operations.
Many businesses are susceptible to attacks that bypass traditional defenses by exploiting valid credentials to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data and entire network systems. These types of attacks can have devastating consequences, forcing companies to rebuild their systems and recover from complex breaches.
That’s where comprehensive identity observability plays a vital role. It allows for real-time contextual monitoring and analysis of all identity-related activities, both human and non-human, as well as access pathways. Identity observability gives identity and security teams a clear understanding of what’s happening within the identity infrastructure, why it’s happening, and how to manage it. Additionally, it provides an in-depth analysis of patterns and risky identity behaviors in real time.
The difficulty in detecting identity-based threats frequently stems from a lack of context around activities that might appear legitimate on their own. However, when viewed within the context of other events over time, these activities often reveal malicious intent. Therefore, consistently examining identity activities within a temporal framework significantly enhances the value of identity observability and protection, revealing insights into the changing nature of identity risks. By incorporating temporal context into identity observability, security teams can identify and mitigate many more dangerous threats before they cause significant damage.
The Power of Time-Based Context in Enhancing Identity Observability
The challenges of identity management and hygiene are becoming more complex as the identity fabric itself evolves further. Analyzing a single identity activity at a single snapshot in time offers insufficient information to determine its legitimacy. A comprehensive analysis requires considering the activity’s relation to other preceding, concurrent, and subsequent activities to identify potential threat patterns. Time-based analysis is, therefore, essential to security operations, allowing for retrospective examination of identity activities—including both human and non-human identities—posture changes, patterns, and outliers over time, such as fluctuations in identity creation rates.
By leveraging observability combined with time-based contextualization to enhance threat detection, security teams gain a more refined understanding of threats. This analysis also allows them to better understand how to respond to cyber-risks and threat patterns across the identity infrastructure, by enabling continual monitoring of trends and changes in identity activities.
Identity observability allows organizations to be better prepared to protect themselves against identity-related threats effectively and efficiently. Some of the most important benefits include:
- Strengthened Identity Visibility: Detecting and reviewing all identities, assets, and identity systems over time.
- Improved Identity Hygiene: Understanding identity posture trends, detecting stale identities that should be removed, and identifying accesses that bypass security controls like MFA or PAM, and more.
- Detection of Risky Activity: Identifying suspicious activity patterns such as credential misuse, or conflicting or impossible access patterns.
- Fast Incident Response: Investigating identity activities for potentially compromised human or machine identities with swift precision.
By moving beyond simply monitoring known managed identities and assets and then analyzing their activities throughout time, organizations can gain crucial insights and improve their security posture to reduce identity-related risks. With added observability and time-based context, organizations can be better prepared to face any potential vulnerabilities and maintain robust identity-related security.
It’s clear that static approaches to identity security are no longer sufficient. Historical context and dynamic time-based analysis provide significant operational value for identity observability and help to improve the impact of identity protection efforts.
