In April we partnered with the National Cybersecurity Alliance (NCA) on the first ever Identity Management Day to raise awareness about the importance of securing digital identities. For 18 years the NCA has hosted Cybersecurity Awareness Month to ensure organizations and individuals have the resources they need to stay safer and more secure online.
In recent years, compromised identity has emerged as the leading cause of hacking related breaches in organizations (VDBIR). Most of the highest profile breaches making news can be traced back to a compromised identity. According to our research, 83% of organizations said remote work due to the pandemic increased the number of identities, further increasing their attack surface. To stay safe and secure online, organizations must focus specifically on protecting the identities – human and non-human – that are used to access resources and data.
The Identity Defined Security Alliance was founded on the premise that you can’t talk about security without talking about identity. During the last week of October organizations were being asked to make security a priority and we went one step further to suggest that making security a priority, also means making identity a priority in cybersecurity strategies. We hope that #BeIdentitySmart Week provided advice, best practices and more, to help you start an identity-centric security program and align it with key business initiatives/programs across your organization. Thanks to all who participated!
Here’s a quick recap:
The Guide to Identity Defined Security: helps organizations mitigate the risk of an identity-related breach by providing best practices and recommendations for implementing an identity-defined security strategy. This definitive guide to identity defined security is a compilation of several years of research, domain expertise and best practices collaboratively developed by leading identity and security vendors, solution providers and practitioners.
Identity Security Challenges in 2022?: We asked our champions, What is going to be the biggest challenge for identity security in 2022? Read more about what they think organizations need to be focused on in the coming year and beyond.
Best Practices and Advice: Each day of #BeIdentitySmart Week, we published advice from our champions, perspectives from the IDSA Technical Working Group subcommittees and IDSA members focused on specific identity-security related themes:
- Transforming Experience Through Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM)
- The Growing Importance of Protecting Machine Identities
- Applying Identity to DevSecOps Tools and Processes
- Improving Identity Insights with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
What Does it Mean to #BeIdentitySmart?: Our expert panel shared their perspective on the role of identity security in their cybersecurity strategies, the impact it has on key business initiatives and advice for aligning identity and security strategies.
Why Does Identity Matter?: Our research shows that Identity Management has long been considered an operational function – it enables the right individuals to access the right resources at the right times for the right reasons. However, identities have become the prime target for hackers, giving them the easiest path to breach an organization, by allowing them to simply login with a set of valid credentials. This infographic provides the stats that support the need for better identity management and digital identity security.
While we used Cybersecurity Awareness Month and #BeIdentitySmart week to highlight the importance of identity in security strategies, we encourage security leaders to recognize all throughout the year that to #BeCyberSmart, you must also must #BeIdentitySmart.
