What Is Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM)

What is identity security posture management (ISPM)?

Identity security posture management (ISPM) is a comprehensive and proactive approach to securing an organization’s digital identities and access privileges. It involves continuously monitoring, assessing, and improving the security of identity-related systems and access controls to ensure that user identities, permissions, and access behaviors align with an organization’s security policies.

Why is identity security posture management important?

• Identity is the new perimeter: Traditional network security focuses on protecting the “walls” around your organization. But with cloud computing and remote work, those walls have become blurred. Now, identity is the primary way to control access to your resources, making it a prime target for cyber attacks.
• Reduce risk of data breaches: A huge percentage of data breaches involve compromised credentials or misused access rights. ISPM helps you proactively reduce these risks.
• Compliance requirements necessitate ISPM: Many regulations (like GDPR, HIPAA, etc.) require organizations to protect sensitive data. ISPM helps you meet these requirements by ensuring proper security controls and data governance.
• Reduces the attack surface: By identifying and eliminating unnecessary access, misconfigurations, and vulnerabilities, ISPM shrinks the “attack surface” that hackers can exploit.
• Improves overall security posture: ISPM strengthens your overall security by proactively addressing identity risks, rather than just reacting to incidents after they occur.
• Enhances operational efficiency: Automating identity management tasks (like access reviews and lifecycle management) frees up your IT team to focus on other critical tasks.
• Protects against insider threats: ISPM helps you monitor user activity and detect suspicious behavior, which can be crucial for preventing or mitigating insider threats.
• Enables secure cloud adoption: As organizations move more workloads to the cloud, ISPM ensures that identities and access rights are managed securely in these new environments.

What security challenges does ISPM address?

Misconfigurations

• Misconfigurations in identity and access management (IAM) systems are a major source of vulnerabilities. These can include things like excessive privileges (users with more access than they need), incorrect permission settings, or failing to properly implement multi-factor authentication (MFA).
• ISPM provides continuous monitoring and assessment of identity configurations. It can identify misconfigurations, flag them for review, and often even suggest remediation steps. This helps organizations maintain a secure baseline and prevent accidental or malicious misconfigurations that could lead to breaches.

Vulnerabilities

• Identity systems, like any software, can have vulnerabilities. These can be exploited by attackers to gain unauthorized access. Legacy systems, like Active Directory, are particularly known for having inherent vulnerabilities.
• ISPM solutions often include vulnerability scanning and assessment capabilities. They can identify known vulnerabilities in identity systems and prioritize them based on risk. This allows security teams to proactively patch vulnerabilities and reduce the attack surface.

Risk exposure

Risk exposure in identity security refers to the potential for unauthorized access and the impact that could have. This can be increased by things like dormant accounts, excessive permissions, or a lack of visibility into user activity.

ISPM helps reduce risk exposure by:

• Improving visibility: Providing a clear view of all identities, access rights, and activities.
• Enforcing least privilege access: Ensuring users only have the access they need to do their jobs.
• Automating lifecycle management: Streamlining the creation, modification, and deletion of user accounts to prevent orphaned or over-privileged accounts.
• Detecting anomalies: Monitoring user behavior for suspicious activity that could indicate a compromised account.

Capabilities of identity security posture management solutions

Identity security posture management (ISPM) isn’t a single product, but a comprehensive approach. Effective ISPM solutions typically incorporate several key capabilities, often drawing from and integrating with existing tools.

Identity and access management (IAM)

IAM is foundational to ISPM. It focuses on ensuring that only authorized identities (employees, contractors, partners, machines, etc.) can access critical resources. This involves:

• Authentication: Verifying the identity of a user or device (e.g., using passwords, MFA, biometrics).
• Authorization: Determining what a user or device is allowed to access after authentication (based on roles, policies, context).
• Access control: Enforcing those authorization policies to restrict access to sensitive data and systems. This can be granular, down to specific files or actions.

Privileged access management (PAM)

PAM specifically addresses the risks associated with privileged accounts (accounts with elevated permissions). It goes beyond basic IAM by:

• Securing privileged credentials: Storing and managing passwords for privileged accounts in a secure vault.
• Just-in-time (JIT) access: Granting privileged access only when needed, and for a limited time.
• Session recording and monitoring: Tracking and auditing privileged user activity to detect suspicious behavior.
• Least privilege enforcement: Restricting privileged users to only the minimum necessary access rights.

Identity governance and administration (IGA)

IGA focuses on the lifecycle management of identities and their access rights, ensuring compliance and reducing risk. Key aspects include:

• Provisioning/deprovisioning: Automating the creation and deletion of user accounts and access rights as employees join, move roles, or leave the organization.
• Access certification/review: Regularly reviewing user access rights to ensure they are still appropriate and revoke any unnecessary access.
• Policy management: Defining and enforcing access policies based on roles, regulations, and business requirements.
• Compliance reporting: Generating reports on user access and activity to demonstrate compliance with relevant regulations.

Identity analytics and risk intelligence

Identity analytics and risk intelligence leverages data and analytics to identify and assess identity-related risks. This includes:

• Behavioral analytics: Using machine learning to establish baselines for normal user behavior and detect anomalies that could indicate a compromised account or insider threat.
• Risk scoring: Assigning risk scores to users and access rights based on various factors, such as access sensitivity, user activity, and threat intelligence.
• Threat detection: Identifying and alerting on suspicious activity, such as unusual login attempts, access to sensitive data outside of normal working hours, or access from unusual locations.

Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM)

As organizations increasingly rely on cloud services, CIEM has become crucial. It focuses on managing access entitlements in cloud environments:

• Cloud visibility: Providing a clear view of all identities and their permissions across cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Entitlement management: Managing and controlling access to cloud resources based on the principle of least privilege.
• Automated remediation: Identifying and automatically fixing excessive permissions and other cloud-related security risks.

ISPM implementation

Comprehensive identity visibility

The modern identity landscape is complex, spanning cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments. Comprehensive identity visibility is crucial. It means having a clear and complete view of all users (human and non-human), their access rights, and the configurations of your identity systems, regardless of where those identities and systems reside. Without this visibility, you can’t effectively manage risk or enforce security policies.

Risk assessments

Regular risk assessments are essential for proactively identifying vulnerabilities in your identity management systems. These assessments help you discover security gaps, pinpoint compromised credentials and affected accounts, and understand potential attack paths that adversaries could exploit. By understanding your weaknesses, you can take steps to mitigate them before they’re exploited.

Continuous monitoring

Once you understand your baseline identity security posture, you can establish what “normal” user and device activity looks like. Continuous monitoring involves constantly analyzing user and device behavior to detect anomalies and suspicious activity. This helps you identify potential security threats in real time, enabling faster response and preventing breaches.

Multi-factor authentication (MFA)

MFA significantly strengthens security by requiring users to provide multiple forms of verification (e.g., password and a code from a mobile app, biometric scan, etc.). This makes it much harder for attackers to gain access, even if they manage to steal a password. MFA also enables conditional access, allowing you to grant access to sensitive resources only when specific conditions are met.

Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM)

Identity security extends to the cloud. CIEM is crucial for managing entitlements and permissions across all your cloud infrastructure resources. It helps prevent the unintentional or unchecked granting of excessive permissions, which can lead to significant security risks in cloud environments. CIEM ensures that only authorized users and services have the necessary access to cloud resources.

Improve ISPM with ConductorOne

• Centralizing identity visibility: ConductorOne integrates with all your identity sources (Active Directory, IdPs, HR systems, cloud providers, applications, etc.) to create a unified view of every identity (human and machine) and their associated access rights. This eliminates data silos and shadow IT, providing a comprehensive understanding of who has access to what across your entire environment. This is crucial for effective risk assessment and control.
• Automating key processes: ConductorOne automates time-consuming and error-prone manual tasks. This includes access reviews (regularly certifying user access), identity lifecycle management (onboarding, offboarding, role changes), and risk remediation workflows (revoking access for orphaned or over-privileged accounts). Automation frees up IT and security teams to focus on more strategic initiatives.
• Strengthening security: ConductorOne enhances security in several ways: It facilitates the implementation of least privilege, ensuring users only have the access they absolutely need. It enables just-in-time (JIT) access, granting temporary privileges only when required, minimizing the window of opportunity for attackers. And it detects identity-related security risks like overprivileged, orphaned, and unused accounts.
• Improving compliance: ConductorOne helps organizations meet regulatory requirements by providing detailed audit trails of user access, automated access certifications, and detection and remediation of separation of duties (SoD) violations. This reduces the burden of compliance audits and demonstrates due diligence.
• Reducing manual effort: By automating many identity-related tasks, ConductorOne significantly reduces the manual workload on IT and security teams. This not only saves time and resources but also minimizes the risk of human error, which can often lead to security vulnerabilities.
• Enhancing risk management: ConductorOne helps organizations proactively identify, assess, and mitigate identity-related risks. It provides insights into potential vulnerabilities, such as over-privileged accounts, orphaned accounts, and inactive users, enabling security teams to prioritize remediation efforts.
• Simplifying cloud security: Managing access in cloud environments can be complex. ConductorOne simplifies cloud security by providing visibility into cloud entitlements and enabling consistent enforcement of access policies across different cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP). This helps prevent cloud misconfigurations and security breaches.
• Integrating with existing tools: ConductorOne integrates with other security tools, such as SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) and SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) platforms. This allows for a more coordinated and automated approach to security, enabling faster threat detection and response.

Book a demo with our team to learn how ConductorOne can help you improve your identity security posture.

FAQs

How do you improve your identity security posture?

Improving your identity security posture is an ongoing process. Key steps include:

• Gain visibility: Understand all your identities, access rights, and systems.
• Implement strong authentication: Enforce MFA wherever possible.
• Enforce the principle of least privilege: Grant only the necessary access rights.
• Automate identity lifecycle management: Streamline onboarding, offboarding, and access reviews.
• Monitor continuously: Detect and respond to suspicious activity.
• Conduct regular risk assessments: Identify vulnerabilities and prioritize remediation.
• Train employees: Educate users about security best practices.
• Stay updated: Keep your systems patched and informed about new cyber threats.

How ISPM enhances IAM?

ISPM builds upon IAM by adding a layer of proactive security. While IAM focuses on defining access (who can access what), ISPM focuses on managing and securing that access over time. ISPM helps you:

• Continuously monitor IAM configurations for misconfigurations and vulnerabilities.
• Automate many IAM tasks (like access reviews and lifecycle management).
• Apply risk intelligence to IAM decisions.
• Extend IAM to cover all your environments (cloud, on-premises, etc.). Essentially, ISPM makes your IAM implementation more robust and secure.

What are the three common principles used to define a security posture?

While interpretations can vary, three core principles often used are:

• Confidentiality: Ensuring that sensitive information is only accessible to authorized individuals.
• Integrity: Maintaining the accuracy and trustworthiness of data, preventing unauthorized modification.
• Availability: Guaranteeing that authorized users can access information and systems when needed. Sometimes a fourth principle, “Accountability” (tracking actions to specific individuals) is also included.

What is the difference between ITDR and ISPM?

• ITDR (Identity Threat Detection and Response) focuses on detecting and responding to identity-related threats after they occur.
• ISPM (Identity Security Posture Management) is more proactive, focusing on preventing those threats in the first place by continuously assessing and improving your security posture.

Think of ITDR as the fire department (responding to incidents), while ISPM is fire prevention (reducing the risk of fires). Ideally, you need both – a strong posture to minimize threats and the ability to respond quickly when they do occur.