A few short years ago, before the cloud and SaaS proliferation, organizational identities were based on clearly defined, numbered and managed users connected to on-premises servers. Attackers, at the time, focused on abusing gaps in hardened networks and application infrastructure because identities were controlled, visible and secure, making them unlucrative targets. The cloud revolution and its byproducts, including remote working environments, digital transformation and disparate workforces, made identity the new business asset - and attacker priority.

In this new era, employees use multiple identities to connect from anywhere to the organizational environment and access corporate assets and sensitive data with minimal oversight. As businesses leverage the benefits of the technological revolution in order to scale, the growing number of employees, contractors, vendors, machines, users and identities has resulted in an expansive, unmanaged and misunderstood identity jungle.

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Always quick to identify and exploit blind spots and chaos, attackers were not far behind and take advantage of this chaos in order to perform account takeovers, abuse stolen credentials and expand their attacks’ blast radius. Despite an uptick in spending on IAM, zero-trust and other identity security and risk management solutions, eight in ten breaches today are identity-driven. This dramatic data point shows a clearly unresolved problem: identity security is broken.

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Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM) is a new approach to identity security, which moves away from a disconnected patchwork of identity tools that provide partial, incremental and sporadic visibility and mitigation capabilities. Helping CISOs regain trust in their identity security programs, ISPM helps them ascertain their organization’s identity risks and provide stakeholders with an accurate assessment or mitigation strategy. Rather than adding more tools to the identity stack, ISPM solutions increase the ROI of existing security solutions by ensuring that existing IAM, IGA and PAM tools are streamlined and effective and that they are up to par with identity security benchmarks and guidelines.

ISPM platforms are a one-stop shop for security leaders who need to see, understand and secure all of their identities, users, permissions and actions - but currently use tools that just don’t deliver. End-to-end identity coverage, which is the most fundamental element in the ISPM approach, provides security teams with confidence in their ability to see and secure their entire identity landscape. This is a new - and necessary - evolution in identity security.

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