Identity and access management has grown to encompass a number of key responsibilities inside today’s enterprise. From account provisioning to access requests and group memberships, IAM teams have their hands full with responsibilities that often don’t line up squarely with defined operating functions of the business. Identity security is a high priority for both identity and security professionals as identity presents a unique set of challenges when it comes to detecting and responding to threats against an organization.
Let’s take a look at five questions that leaders in identity and access management need to be able to answer about their identity security.
1. Do we have dormant accounts just sitting in our identity provider (IdP)?
Identities with an active status in your IdP don’t typically stop performing actions for 30+ days. When this happens, it is often because the account has been forgotten or otherwise abandoned, remaining active indefinitely in the shadows. These inactive accounts are sitting ducks for account takeover attacks. Oort monitors your active identities and alerts you when they sit unused so they can be cleaned up quickly.
2. Have we successfully disabled terminated users in all identity systems?
Employees and contractors come and go frequently, and often in large numbers. With the potential for dozens of systems of identity in use, it can be hard to know with certainty that terminated employees or contractors no longer have access to any information or resources. Oort discovers users who are active in your IdP but not in your HR system (and vice versa) so you can quickly respond to the mismatch that is creating an identity threat against your organization.
3. Do we have non-employees in our Slack?
Slack is a ubiquitous communications platform and employees often use it to share information with a false assumption of confidentiality. Many organizations also grant access to Slack for their contractors and other non-employees, unwittingly granting them access to privileged assets that can pose a serious threat. Oort shows you users who are in your Slack but not in your IdP so you can quickly understand which users outside of your organization might be seeing your corporate secrets.
Download the free PDF guide with the two remaining questions here, then see how your IAM team is doing with the answers for your organization:
Identity security is a struggle
Studies have shown that companies with over 500 employees have more than 25 systems of identity to manage. With people coming and going all the time, and with many systems all integrated with one another, organizations struggle to keep up with the machine-made sprawl that creates these identity threats. This same automation that was designed to create efficiencies in managing identities has also propagated identities to a scale that has made it impossible for humans to know who’s doing what where and when. Identity professionals are simply buried in operational tasks just to keep the lights on, and this leads to identity security becoming porous or deprioritized. With over 60% of security breaches resulting from the abuse of valid identity credentials, identity security can no longer be ignored.
Oort makes identity security easy with a drop-in identity threat detection and response platform that works right away to eliminate identity threats at scale. Don’t fight machines with people alone. Set up an industry-leading 15-minute demo, and arm your identity professionals with a powerful identity security platform that’s built for scale.
