How Authomize Addresses Gartner’s Security Trends for 2022
For the better part of the past ten years, organizations have been speaking about how moving their business to the cloud was a core part of their roadmap.
Some were better than others about sticking to that roadmap — looking at them more so as aspirations than set plans as roadmaps often are.
And then came the pandemic at the start of 2020 and anyone who was still working became a remote working organization essentially by default. Now with all of the Return to Office dates having come and gone, we have settled into the hybrid state of work for what is likely to be the way things get done for the foreseeable future — much to the continued delight of many.
All except the Security and IT teams that have to facilitate it of course.
With the sudden and total shift of work to the cloud, and a collection of VPNs in some unfortunate cases, organizations have faced a new set of challenges in keeping themselves secure.
Beneath the cover of the pandemic-driven pushing up schedules in moving to cloud, what we are seeing arise is a set of issues that security professionals have been working to address as we move the center of our work outside of the old concepts of the perimeter to a place where work is done from everywhere across a wide range of apps and services.
At the same time, we are even more interconnected with one another, increasing dependence and our potential for exposure.
In recognition of these trends, the analysts over at Gartner have singled out what they view as seven of the most important pressing issues and changes that organizations need to address.
Gartner Trends’ Top Security and Risk Management Trends for 2022
We recommend taking a moment to read through their press release outlining the “Top Security and Risk Management Trends for 2022” for yourself to get their analysts’ perspective and explanations.
They list the trends as such:
- Trend 1: Attack Surface Expansion
- Trend 2: Digital Supply Chain Risk
- Trend 3: Identity Threat Detection and Response
- Trend 4: Distributing Decisions
- Trend 5: Beyond Awareness
- Trend 6: Vendor Consolidation
- Trend 7: Cybersecurity Mesh
Peter Firstbrook, Research Vice President at Gartner, writes in the statement that, “The pandemic accelerated hybrid work and the shift to the cloud, challenging CISOs to secure an increasingly distributed enterprise — all while dealing with a shortage of skilled security staff.”
Staying Several Steps Ahead of the Curve
Put another way, more of our assets are spread out across wide, potentially exposed surface areas and we need to find smarter ways to work with technologies and others in our concentric, interwoven circles if we want to stay ahead of the curve.
From Authomize’s perspective, reading through this list led us to do a lot of head nodding, recalling plenty of conversations that we’ve had with our customers.
While moving to the various cloud environments has given organizations the ability to run faster and be more flexible, the transition has in many instances been closer to the experience of throwing all of your things into boxes when you move and then just dumping them out at your new apartment.
Sure everything is now there at your new, better place. But you missed the opportunity to figure out what you wanted to keep/get rid of, and have not actually organized things smartly so now you can’t find anything and you’re tripping over legos on the floor.
We built Authomize with the goal of addressing the challenges of:
- Widely distributed identities and assets spread across multiple cloud environments
- A market filled with fractious point products that only address a portion of the problem
- Actually being able to validate that the systems that we depend on to secure our access to our assets are showing us the full, accurate picture of what identities (both those inside the organization and from out) can access, what kind of privileges they have, and the activity of how those access privileges are being used.
And looking at Gartner’s summation of the trends facing us in 2022, we see a validation of our platform and vision that addresses each and every one of these points.
Trend 1: Attack Surface Expansion
Our comprehensive yet granular detection across all cloud environments that allows us to identify all assets, providing for cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM).
Trend 2: Digital Supply Chain Risk
Sharing resources with external partners is a standard, practical part of business, but it has to be managed securely. Our visibility and control over externally accessibility allows users to revoke risk access based on usage data, minimizing their risk.
Trend 3: Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR)
Authomize does more than just carry on where your authentication solutions drop off. Our platform validates each and every access privilege and activity, verifying that they are in line with your security policies.
We are the Identity and Access Zero Trust answer to the question of how can CISOs and their security teams be sure that the state of their access privileges are in fact at the secure state that they are supposed to be, acting as the assurance layer that continuously monitors that access to ensure security and compliance.
This last point has become increasingly important as we see attackers stepping up attacks on the identity layer (as we saw in the SolarWinds attack) and those identity security management tools themselves being undermined by the adversaries for carrying out their operations (as the Okta breach demonstrated).
Authomize is the only platform that is truly capable of monitoring and validating the information flowing from your IdP, IGA, and other IAM tools, fitting the textbook definition of an Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) solution to a tee.
Trend 4: Distributing Decisions
Security teams often lack the direct knowledge over if an identity’s access privileges are correct or if an action was appropriate. This necessitates communicating with the right manager who can make the call.
Authomize provides data-driven recommendations, using the context from our deep understanding of who the identity is within the organization, what their activity is, and the potential risks that the organization may be facing.
We provide all this information to the manager who can make more informed decisions faster, leading to better security outcomes.
Trend 5: Beyond Awareness
Empowering your reviewers with the contextual data they need to complete their reviews quickly and accurately is essential to achieving buy-in for successful Access Reviews.
Taking this step helps to eliminate rubber stamping during reviews and improve your security posture.
Trend 6: Vendor Consolidation
In a field filled with point solutions for each vertical (compliance solutions, IaaS-only, SaaS-only, Data-only, etc), only Authomize provides the cross environmental platform for Identity and Access Security and Compliance.
Trend 7: Cybersecurity Mesh
We play well with others. Lots of others.
In addition to our wide range of integrations with popular apps and services like AWS, Salesforce, GitHub, O365, Google, and many more, we are also easy to implement alongside IdPs like Okta, Ping, and Azure AD.
While Authomize can serve as an alternative in some cases to classic IGA and PAM solutions, covering many of their use cases, we also complement these solutions by validating their data and providing organizations with valuable authorization/access privilege visibility and control.
Looking to 2022 and Beyond in Identity and Access Security
Every Gartner report in recent years has pointed to the future of cybersecurity putting identity at the center, making it increasingly important that we embrace the solutions that will enable us to secure access effectively.
For more information about how Authomize can help your organization prepare for the challenges ahead, please contact us for a demo or free consultation.
The post How Authomize Addresses Gartner’s Security Trends for 2022 appeared first on Authomize.
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Authomize authored by Gabriel Avner. Read the original post at: https://www.authomize.com/blog/how-authomize-addresses-gartners-security-trends-for-2022/
