Harnessing Visibility to Move Beyond Reactive Threat Response
Attacks against today’s enterprise are no longer “off the shelf” exploitations. They are well-funded, thoroughly researched and highly customized for their intended targets. They take advantage of the billions of exposure points opened up by today’s borderless infrastructure. They use more attacks launched more frequently to overwhelm and confuse. They target the weakest link, the users. And these attacks are incredibly successful. There is simply no good way to keep up – a fact that is forcing CIOs and organizations to think more strategically about how they respond to these threats.
For most organizations, the most valuable assets are intellectual property – R&D plans, pricing structures, departmental budgets or even employee training materials. In fact, a 2015 report from Ocean Tomo showed that as much as 87 percent of a company’s value is derived from its intellectual property.
Today’s security and IT teams must be much more proactive in their threat response strategy. They can’t research and respond to everything, so they must focus on the attacks that pose the biggest threat to the business. How do you identify the biggest threat? How do you go from reacting to preventing when every breach has the potential to be catastrophic? More importantly, how do you do so without sacrificing innovation?
The answer to these questions starts with visibility. Visibility is essential for focusing protection on the most valuable assets within the organization. Identity governance is the key to unlocking visibility across the business. It provides the inside-out view of what valuable information is at risk of being compromised and – more importantly – who has access to it.
Identity governance connects all the applications, systems and users within the business, even in a complex ecosystem that includes external users such as business partners and vendors. In a business that uses a hybrid infrastructure, intellectual property might reside in applications in the cloud and other information might reside on mainframes or ERP system. Identity governance provides comprehensive visibility across the entire business.
Through the power of identity, you now know where your valuable data resides. You know who can access it, how they’re accessing it and what they’re doing with it. The threats that are most dangerous to your business are known, and you can prioritize your attack investigation. Perhaps most importantly, you now have control and can be proactive.
The Power of Lean
Weight Watchers is a commercial provider of weight management services. Their IT ecosystem includes more than 3000 servers and 70 applications. The IT organization is quite lean and relies heavily on technology to help manage access to these systems.
The organization is moving the majority of their systems into the cloud. One of the key systems they moved recently was identity management. Implementing SailPoint IdentityNow enabled Weight Watchers to automate and streamline security processes that were previously done manually.
In addition to an audit trail of access actions, they have been able to dramatically speed up their onboarding processes. New employees can be productive from their first day.
Unburdened by a large team as well as tedious manual processes, Weight Watchers now has the extra time and resources to dedicate to moving the rest of their infrastructure to the cloud.
The Path to Innovation
The primary benefit of restructuring staff and resources to proactively addressing threats is the ability to operate with a much leaner staff. Leaner doesn’t necessarily mean a smaller staff, but rather one that is more focused. More intentional. A staff that can move quickly because they are not burdened by the extraneous processes or technology that often weigh down a larger team.
Lean teams automate.
Visibility is the crucial precursor to automation. You can’t control what you can’t see. With identity governance, you not only have a clear and documented view of applications, systems and users across the business, you have the power to automate access privileges and entitlements across your entire IT ecosystem. This frees up hours of time that can be reapplied to other areas of the business.
Lean teams innovate.
The visibility provided by identity governance also illuminates areas of the organization that can be evolved to move the business forward. Leaner, more nimble teams are unburdened by processes and procedures so they can quickly take advantages of these opportunities. By understanding what applications and systems are being used across the business – and by who – you can see where gaps exist. Are you missing out on key programs that could improve productivity? Or are you spending money – that could be applied elsewhere – on applications that are not being used?
SailPoint’s Cloud-based Identity Governance Can Help
Savvy IT and security teams operate under the assumption that infrastructure compromise is inevitable. However, with cloud-based identity governance from SailPoint, information compromise is preventable.
SailPoint IdentityNow is the fastest, simplest way to achieve the visibility and control necessary to automate and streamline identity processes. With IdentityNow, forward-thinking teams can easily shift from reactive threat response to proactive asset protection. Free from the time-consuming process of investigating and responding to every threat, organizations can actively focus on innovation and creating measurable value to the business.
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