Okta Adds Security Center to Provide Real-Time Threat Visibility
Okta this week made available Security Center, an extension of the Okta Customer Identity Cloud that provides a real-time view of authentication events, potential security incidents and threat response efficacy.
Ian Hassard, senior director of product management for Okta, said Security Center will enable organizations to monitor attacks that compromise the identity of end users or customers as they are being launched.
In addition, Security Center also enables organizations to see how security controls are impacting user experience in real-time. Cybersecurity teams can then see how the tactics they are using may be adversely impacting those experiences without navigating through log data.
Security Center is powered by Auth0, which is widely used by developers to manage authentication and authorization within an application. Okta acquired Auth0 in 2021 and will use Security Center to add additional custom alerts and incident management capabilities, noted Hassard.
More organizations than ever are shifting toward an identity-centric approach to cybersecurity as they look to implement zero-trust policies. With the release of Security Center, Okta is now providing real-time visibility into attacks involving, for example, account takeovers that compromise identities.
In theory, while every person has an identity, so too do applications and even machines. Any approach to zero-trust IT needs to consider all the types of identities that need to be secured. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) describes zero-trust IT as an “evolving set of cybersecurity paradigms that move defenses from static, network-based perimeters to focus on users, assets, and resources.” In other words, there is no implicit trust granted to any person, application or machine.
Just as critical, zero-trust IT means organizations need to move away from relying on passwords to grant access. Although still widely used, the last few years have taught organizations just how easily passwords can be compromised by phishing attacks.
Making the transition to that level of zero-trust security obviously will take time and money, both of which are in short supply. Most organizations today rely on directories to manage access to applications and services. However, directories were never really intended to be security tools. IT organizations need a more comprehensive approach to identity that spans people, machines and software.
Fortunately, there’s a greater appreciation for the need for a more robust approach to maintaining cybersecurity as organizations launch zero-trust IT initiatives. Of course, achieving and maintaining zero-trust is more challenging with more employees working from home more often. An employee that logged into an application in the office yesterday might tomorrow be in a café. Cybersecurity teams need to be able to visualize who is logged into what applications and from where at any given moment. That can’t be accomplished using logs that are difficult to parse.
Every cybersecurity team knows that it’s not possible to secure something they can’t visualize in real-time. Otherwise, the best they can do is remediate a breach after damage has already been inflicted.
