Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Privileged accounts are the keys to every organization’s kingdom. Protecting them isn’t optional. After all, the fallout of a breach can affect almost every part of the business. From leaking sensitive information and intellectual property, to fines and reputational damage from non-compliance or lack of governance.

When you unify a complex technology landscape that consists of diverse deployments—including on-premises, legacy systems, multi-cloud and hybrid environments—you inevitably create a tangled web of identities, each with its own set of security challenges. Identity and access management (IAM) as we know it struggles to keep up. It becomes increasingly complex to manage user access across disparate systems, to maintain consistent security policies and to meet compliance regulations.

Active Directory (AD) officially reaches its quarter-century this year, after its late-1990s preview and full release with Windows Server 2000. That’s over 25 years of providing administrators with tools to manage permissions, endpoints and access for network-based resources and objects. In that time, it’s grown to become the choice of around 90% of the Global Fortune 1000s.

Managing an enterprise-level Active Directory (AD) means enterprise-grade volumes of identity accounts. Naturally, operations at this scale come with high complexity and call for intensive resources to maintain control. Manual errors can creep in as the business expands, leading to increased cybersecurity risks and vulnerabilities.

Lately, the common theme in emerging identity security technology is AI. It’s all anyone wants to talk about. All of us in the IAM business have been scurrying to find a way to tell our customers and the market that, yes! We have AI! We've had it all along! If that were so obviously true, why isn’t it more broadly known? As an identity security technologist, I’ve experienced the growing pains of AI in IAM. I recently read an interesting essay by a science fiction author.

Organizations have long focused on securing human users – employees, partners and customers. But what about the identities that aren’t tied to a person? Non-human identities (NHIs), including service accounts, bots, APIs, machine identities and more, now outnumber human identities 20:1 in most organizations! Yet, they often lack proper oversight, making them a growing security risk.

Your business depends on the protection of your most critical assets. Prioritizing Tier 0 assets and deploying a tiered administration model is a great way to strengthen the security protecting what matters most – your identities. We will discuss both of these concepts in detail in this post.

The 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) found that compromised credentials consistently appeared as a key attack enabler – with almost 77% of web app breaches enabled by stolen credentials. Organizations are scrambling to protect credentials, and Just-In-Time (JIT) access has emerged as an effective strategy to address these challenges. JIT access grants elevated permissions only when necessary, minimizing the attack surface and reducing the risk of unauthorized access.

Identity and access management (IAM) is part of a world where the only constant is change. Whether from emerging technologies and new cyber threats, or unpredictable human behaviors and shifting business priorities – cybersecurity is in a state of permanent flux. These developments have caused many cybersecurity teams to harden their defenses with methods such as identity-based and passwordless authentication.