4 Signs It is Time to Update Your Identity Management

What are 4 signs that it is time to update your identity management? What capabilities should you prioritize in your identity management as you move to the next generation of cybersecurity technology? 

Remember when all you needed was a password and hackers would sit stumped outside your IT environment? Unfortunately, those days have long since passed. Hackers find new ways to infiltrate the digital perimeter every day and exploit every vulnerability possible. Without a next-generation identity management solution, your enterprise remains exposed. Essentially, you lay out the welcome mat for every external threat actor that can find you. 

So how do you know when it’s time to update your identity management solution? 

4 Signs It’s Time to Update Your Identity Management

1. It Only Uses Passwords

It doesn’t get more simple than this. If your authentication relies on passwords, you are already on the backfoot. Actually, you are already several steps back, being pummeled by a barrage of cyber-attacks. Hackers love passwords because they are both widespread and incredibly ineffectual. 

A smart hacker could easily guess someone’s password by looking at publicly available information on social media. Alternatively, they could just use a phishing attack and simply ask the user for their password. Otherwise, they might use a password hacking tool cheaply available on the Dark Web or buy a list of previously used passwords and try a credential stuffing attack. 

The main takeaway here is that hackers have myriad ways to get past password protections. Your enterprise can’t afford any of them. 

Instead, you need a next-generation identity management solution with multifactor authentication (MFA) to secure all of your users’ identities. Multifactor authentication puts additional walls between access request and access granted, keeping hackers out and only minimally changing the login experience for users. 

2. Inability to Monitor After Login

One of the key signs it’s time to update your identity management is if it fails to provide any means of visibility after the login process. 

Here’s the thing: even the most sophisticated multifactor authentication capabilities can’t keep all hackers out. Perhaps due to a phishing attack or an undetected vulnerability, a hacker could find a way to slip through into the IT environment. 

If you can only monitor users from the authentication portal, how would you know someone’s credentials have become compromised until it was too late? 

More and more next-generation identity management solutions now feature means of monitoring users’ behaviors and looking for baseline violations that could indicate compromises. Additionally, privileged access management tools offer session monitoring so you can see exactly what your most powerful users do with their permissions. 

3. Can’t Account for the Cloud

This one shouldn’t need explaining, ultimately. Enterprises across the globe have realized that the cloud represents the future of IT environments; it’s not a matter of if but when. With the pandemic forcing many businesses to embrace the cloud faster than expected, the need for more adequate cloud security becomes apparent every day. 

You need to update your identity management if it can’t account for the cloud. This means monitoring, logins, privileged access management, and governance must be accounted for at all times. 

4. Can’t Monitor the Privileges Directly

While monitoring behaviors remains an essential component of all good cybersecurity, making sure that users don’t have the wrong permissions is equally critical. Users with the wrong privileges or with privileges beyond their role in the enterprise can become major targets for external threat actors. Worse, they could evolve into insider threats through either negligence or malice. 

A next-generation identity management solution with governance capabilities can help find users with rogue permissions and rescind those permissions automatically without disrupting workflows. 

You can learn more about how to update your Identity Management in our Buyer’s Guide or check out the Solutions Suggestion Engine.