The easiest way for cybercriminals to attack your network isn’t through a back door, but by using legitimate credentials to walk in the front. Chances are that potential threats like machine identities and privileged insiders are already operating within your organization without sufficient oversight.
For immediate, measurable impact on risk, it makes sense to prioritize the most common and powerful threat vector—identity. A staggering 90% of organizations reported an identity-related breach last year, according to the Identity Defined Security Alliance. Cloud adoption, remote work, and third-party relationships have escalated the number of identities, but in most organizations, identity security strategies haven’t kept pace.
Unfortunately, you can’t secure identities the same way you would in an on-premise world. You can’t shut down a port of an identity. You can’t run a virus scanner on them. As a result, bad actors have found a proverbial door that most organizations can't close. They walk through it and gain unrestricted access to the whole house!
It's time for a change. In this new reality, you need comprehensive visibility over all types of identities and context-based security controls that provide continuous, granular oversight over individual identity behavior. Only then can you adequately protect sensitive systems and data.
Securing identities at every interaction
Delinea is revolutionizing how organizations apply context and intelligence throughout the identity lifecycle across cloud and traditional infrastructure, data, and SaaS applications to eliminate identity-related threats.
While many vendors focus on securing identities through authentication, Delinea believes this approach isn't sufficient, given that 62% of interactive intrusions exploit valid accounts. It's essential to address access levels in real time. Intelligently centralizing authorization enables customers to enforce least privilege or zero trust, effectively minimizing the attack surface.
Let’s dig into what that means for your current identity security capabilities.
Consider...
- If an auditor asked you exactly what sensitive data a privileged user could access in your ERP, how confidently could you answer?
- Could you measure the risk of granting a new contractor access to a business-critical SaaS tool?
- Would you know which machine identity is accessing AWS in an unexpected way and immediately contain them?
If you’re like most companies, probably not. That’s because, until now, identity security and data authorization policies have operated in silos.
For example:
- Most enterprises use multiple identity providers (IdPs) like Entra ID (Active Directory), Okta, and Ping, and have a mix of local and federated identities with different structures for permissions management.
- Cloud identities across IaaS and SaaS platforms are managed by different access policies.
- For business applications, data authorization policies and the like are typically the responsibility of the application or business process owners, with no guidance from the folks in IT or security who are concerned with external threats and tools like PAM or IAM.
Because these systems are so fragmented, it’s challenging to map how services and applications are sharing sensitive data across identities. You don’t know who has access to what data, and what functions or transactions they can execute with their access. Too much access can expose you to non-compliance fines or worse, financial fraud, not to mention leave you open to a security breach.
To reduce risk, context is crucial. You need to understand the full picture of how identities operate in your environment and the scope of their access across all systems, including critical business and financial applications.
We get that it's not easy and we're here to help.
For this vision of identity security to become a reality, we believe PAM must be an embedded part of a comprehensive identity security strategy. Authorizations for all identities, across all systems, must be controlled with consistent policies. All policies must work together with all types of identity providers, cloud platforms, permissions structures, and identity governance tools that operate across a dynamic, hybrid organization.
That’s why we’re pioneering the convergence of identity and data authorization security through the Delinea Platform. With the recent acquisitions of Authomize and Fastpath, we’re integrating new identity security capabilities that’ll transform how all types of identities across your enterprise access critical resources.
Delinea’s revolutionary approach to identity security is built on several guiding principles:
1. Collaboration across the identity lifecycle
Delinea facilitates alignment among IT, security, and business application owners, ensuring that all stakeholders have access to the same unified source of truth and a comprehensive understanding of the organization's identity landscape.
This collaborative approach enhances efficiency across the board, enabling smoother user setup and access management processes, as well as prompt responses to security threats, thereby reducing downtime time and accelerating incident resolution.
Misalignment often stems from various factors within organizational structures. Many PAM/IAM administrators, rooted in on-premise environments, operate within IT operations and infrastructure teams, often working behind the scenes with little recognition despite their crucial role in safeguarding the organization. Additionally, application owners, particularly those overseeing critical systems like ERP or finance, often manage user access independently, without consulting IT or security teams.
Meanwhile, cloud security teams and incident responders in Security Operations Centers may lack direct visibility into identity and access management systems, leading to gaps in understanding regarding privilege and identity security controls, potentially leaving vulnerabilities unaddressed.
With Delinea, there's not only greater alignment, accountability, and efficiency across organizational functions, but by providing a holistic approach, Delinea also enables transparency across teams, streamlining operations and improving decision-making. With enhanced visibility and control over user identities and interactions, the security posture of the enterprise is better protected from external and internal threats.
2. Intelligent, risk-based decisions
Delinea helps organizations adopt a risk-based approach so they can focus on the risks that are most significant to their operations.
Any cybersecurity professional knows it’s not realistic to eliminate risk entirely. All risks aren’t created equal, and the investment in controls around those risks needs to be commensurate with the risk itself. The new Governance category of NIST CSF 2.0 underscores the importance of managing cybersecurity risk effectively.
But here’s the rub: Risk factors are dynamic as your business processes, tech stack, human and machine identities, cloud instances, and partners in your supply chain constantly change. If you don’t have all the information, you can’t make risk-based decisions about investing in appropriate security controls or responding to potential external attacks or insider threats.
That’s where Delinea can help. Our platform enables you to adopt an intelligent, risk-based approach to identity threats, generating risk scores based on a combination of the likelihood that a risk will materialize and the potential impact on your organization. You’ll have complete transparency to understand how scores are calculated and the ability to tune them, so they align with your company’s risk tolerance and reduce the noise in your SIEM.
3. Rapid time to value
Delinea believes you should get the most out of an investment, as quickly as possible. That’s why our solutions are fast to implement and easy to use so they don’t sit on a shelf. The Delinea Platform is designed so you can start by solving your greatest areas of risk and then easily add capabilities to address more types of IT systems, identities, and use cases.
Because the cloud-native Platform is modular, you can build your security strategy on a strong foundation and grow at your own pace, without having to learn a new interface or recreate any of your policies.
To validate the return on a Delinea investment, we partnered with CyberEdge to understand how our customers measure their time to value.
They found that Delinea customers realize:
- Annual financial benefits of $1.7 million
- A first-year ROI of 1,322%, over 12X their first-year investment
- A break-even point of just three months, including implementation time
Get more information on the methodology and detailed findings from each customer interviewed in our recent Key Economic Impact (KEI) Report.