5 ways to protect identity and access for 2024

The sheer number of cyber attacks increasingly threatens digital security. The demand for cybersecurity specialists is growing, driven by the expansion of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and large-scale language models. These developments bring new opportunities and challenges for security professionals, impacting the strategies needed to protect access effectively.

Adopting a comprehensive defense-in-depth strategy covering identity, endpoint, and network can help organizations be better prepared for our opportunities and challenges. To confidently protect identity and access in your organization, here are five areas worth prioritizing:
 

Empowering the workforce with Microsoft Security Copilot

By 2024, generative AI is expected to be incorporated into cybersecurity solutions, playing a key role in securing access. To deal with the increase in cyber attacks, identity professionals need all the help they can get. 

Microsoft Security Copilot can make a difference in a company and help overcome today's security landscape. Generative AI can significantly increase the talent and ingenuity of identity specialists with automation that works at machine speed and intelligence.

With Microsoft Security Copilot, teams can use natural language prompts in Copilot to reduce time spent on common tasks, such as troubleshooting login issues and minimizing gaps in identity lifecycle workflows.
 

Enforce least-privilege access everywhere, including AI applications

One of the questions in the security world is how to protect access to AI applications, especially in corporate (sanctioned) and third-party (non-sanctioned) environments. The consequences of users with excessive permissions are especially damaging in sanctioned AI applications, where users with incorrect permissions can quickly gain access and manipulate company data that was never intended for them.

Organizations must protect AI applications with the same identity and access governance rules that they apply to the rest of their corporate resources. This can be done with an identity governance solution, which makes it possible to define and implement thorough access policies for all users and company resources, including the generative AI applications that the organization decides to adopt. As a result, only the right people will have the right level of access to the right resources.
 

Preparing for more sophisticated attacks

In addition to the known attacks, new techniques are rapidly emerging, posing serious threats. Multifactor authentication adds a layer of security, but cybercriminals still manage to find ways around it.

To stay safe today, companies must adopt a multi-layered security approach, starting by implementing phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication based on encryption or biometrics such as Windows Hello, FIDO2 security keys, certificate-based authentication, and access keys.

For new attacks, such as one-time password (OTP) bots that take advantage of multi-factor authentication fatigue, it is important to educate employees about common social engineering tactics and use the Microsoft Authenticator application to suppress incoming requests when a multi-factor authentication fatigue attack is detected. 
 

Unify access policies across identity, endpoint, and network security

In most companies, the identity, endpoint, and network security functions are isolated, with teams using different technologies to manage access. This is problematic because it requires conditional access changes to be made in multiple locations, increasing the possibility of security breaches, redundancies, and inconsistent access policies between teams. Identity, endpoint, and network tools need to be integrated into a single policy engine since none of the categories alone can protect all access points.

By adopting a Zero Trust security model that covers identity, endpoint, and network security, efficient management of access policies is possible from a single location, analyzing a variety of signals before granting access to resources.
 

Controlling identities and access for multi-cloud

Gaining full visibility over identities with access to multiple clouds is challenging. Many of these identities are created with excessive permissions and little or no control, with less than 5% of the permissions granted actually used, suggesting that the vast majority of non-human identities do not comply with the principles of least privilege access. As a result, attackers turn their attention to applications, focusing on workload identities as a new vulnerable threat vector. Organizations need a unified control center to manage workload identities and permissions across all clouds.

Securing access to your multi-cloud infrastructure across all identity types starts with selecting the methodology that makes sense for the company. Zero Trust provides an excellent, customizable framework that applies just as well to workload identities as it does to human identities.


Contact Hydra iT to secure your company's access in 2024!!