Identity-first Security: How to Keep Your Security Team Strategic

The technological arc as we knew it pre-COVID is moving toward a new perimeter. How we work, where we work, and who we work with have all drastically changed in the last three years.

Security teams across the globe have been forced to adapt to that change at an incredible pace just to keep up, prioritizing security approaches that align with the evolving threat landscape.

That shift in prioritization may have begun as a means to ward off threats and to minimize increased risk, but it has also opened the door for security teams in every organization to play a strategic role in accelerating their businesses. In no area is this opportunity greater than identity.

Taking an identity-first security approach – with a focus on Identity and Access Management (IAM) – marks a significant departure from security’s traditional role as a cost center and opens doors for security teams to instead act as business drivers within an organization. This, in turn, promotes rapid and agile adoption of technology across an organization while at the same time reducing risk.

How we got here

There are three trends that have recently shone a light on the importance of an identity-first security approach: the rise of remote workers, a heterogeneous workforce, and rapid adoption of cloud-based applications. Organizations have recognized that they can be successful outside of the confines of a traditional brick-and-mortar office setting, with a recent study finding that roughly six in 10 U.S. workers who say their jobs can mainly be done from home are working from home all or most of the time. As the workforce has become more remote, many organizations are branching out and working with an increasingly expansive spectrum of collaborators to include contractors and third parties. While these shifts have helped organizations become more agile and more efficient, it also increases the scope of supported technology. Workers expect to be able to use the tools that best suit how they work, and security and IT must be able to quickly adopt and implement those tools to drive productivity.

What is identity-first security?

Today’s workforce has been given far more freedom than those at any other time in recent history. The trade-off is how we make and keep the drastically changing hybrid work environment secure. Traditional network firewall security approaches aren’t effective in the face of a disparate, remote, heterogeneous workforce.

According to Gartner, “identity as the new perimeter has reached critical mass due to technical and cultural shifts.” An identity-first security approach is no longer a nicety – it’s now a necessity.

Identity-first security recognizes that the foundational lever to secure access to an organization’s most critical resources is first and foremost, understanding the identity of users and their devices. Whether it’s an employee, a contractor, an endpoint, or a server, every entity within an organization needs to be authenticated into systems and gain authorization to perform actions.

When a team is enabling secure and seamless access across an organization, and speeding up technology and tool adoption, they’re enabling the business just as much as they’re protecting it. That combination requires that security has a seat at the table when it comes to organizational growth and the adoption of new technology.

Identity security should be top of mind

Using identity as the central control point for delivering access to enterprise resources can serve as the foundation for some of the most important elements of an organization’s security approach. An identity-first security approach can:

• Ensure users are authenticated and devices are secure
• Broker access to all critical resources, including SaaS apps, on-premise apps, APIs, networks, and infrastructure
• Give the right amount of access for the right amount of time
• Remove access automatically when required
• Prevent lateral movement in the event that identity is compromised
• Rapidly mitigate the risk of compromised credentials

Today’s modern enterprises use cloud and hybrid resources to their advantage, connecting the right people to the right technologies at the right time. But, are those connections secure? If an organization is not 100% certain about the legitimacy of a user initiating an access request, any other form of security or access controls that the organization may have in place are irrelevant.

Identity-first security simultaneously minimizes risk and enables growth

The right identity solution is vital to a business’s bottom – and increasingly, top – line. Whether it’s on a day-to-day basis or on a new employee or contractor’s first day on the job, strong identity controls can set the stage for secure access across managed or unmanaged devices, powered by automated lifecycle management activities, ensuring the right access to the right data at the right time. An effective solution and approach allow security teams to successfully collaborate with their respective IT departments prompting fast and efficient access to resources.

Taking an identity-first approach to security also helps businesses adopt new technology faster and seamlessly, letting them address business problems head-on and with agility, rather than with roadblocks. In addition to security, identity has become the lynchpin for rapid deployment and implementation, with IAM serving as the core security solution that many organizations use to embark on a Zero Trust journey.

It’s all about the right identity solution

The Okta Identity Cloud helps organizations deliver strong identity access controls across their entire ecosystem – maximizing security, while minimizing the overall impact on the workforce. By centralizing controls and leveraging thousands of pre-built integrations across both business applications and security tools, teams can more easily deploy and manage intelligent access for any resource type, on-premises or in the cloud, and end users can more easily gain access to the tools and data they need, when they need them. The Okta Identity Cloud allows organizations to protect what matters most – their people and resources, while delivering seamless user access that can be easily integrated into existing tech stacks.

Developing an identity-first security posture doesn’t happen overnight, but it’s critical to securely growing a business. By adopting an identity-first mindset, security leaders can drive better security outcomes while solving real business challenges, making all kinds of workers all over the planet more productive.

To learn more about Okta Identity Cloud, visit us here.