By Abhishek Gupta, Managing Director, SailPoint India
As companies in India and across the world step up their digital transformation efforts, the expansion of workloads into the cloud and widespread adoption of SaaS solutions coupled with the growing sophistication of cybersecurity attacks utilising advanced techniques and AI has rendered traditional network perimeter-based security ineffective. Identity security is an important security capability that every organisation must get right – businesses can’t run without technology, and you can’t use technology without identity security.
What is identity security and why is it important?
Identity security (also known as identity governance and identity management) enables you to manage and govern all user accounts, roles, and entitlements for all applications, systems, data and cloud services, all while maintaining the same level of consistency and visibility across the entire organisation. It shields against the cyber threats linked to granting technology access to a diverse workforce. It does this by enabling the management and governance of access for every digital identity within an organisation.
With 83% of Indian organisations experiencing an identity-related incident in 2023 as per industry reports, identity security programs serve as a crucial line of defence to mitigate threats to the business. There is a steep cost to not investing in identity security and inaction could pose a risk of derailing strategic priorities such as digital transformations, cloud migrations, divestitures, mergers, and product innovation. A single negative identity experience can lead to permanent loss of a customer, resulting in revenue losses and potential harm to a company’s reputation.
Building a business case for identity security
SailPoint’s The Horizons of Identity Security 2023 report, which is based on insights from more than 375 global cybersecurity executives across the Americas, Europe, and Asia, revealed that close to half (44%) of companies are still at the beginning of their identity journeys, lacking foundational governance and holistic visibility into the identities in their environment. What is even more concerning is that a whopping 91% of identity security decision-makers within organisations are failing to build a business case, with budgetary constraints and limited executive sponsorship primary obstacles to investment. This clearly indicates that identity security advocates need to build executive-friendly business cases that are tailored to their audiences’ strategic priorities and can quantify value as well.
The report highlights four areas where identity security can drive business value:
– Business agility and innovation: An effective identity security program has the potential to streamline customer and partner experiences by simplifying onboarding and sign-on processes. It can expedite organisational change, such as mergers or divestitures, by as much as 30% through quicker integration of identities, applications, data, and infrastructure. Moreover, it can democratise and facilitate quick experimentation with data, accelerating development of analytics & AI use-cases and empowering decentralised, agile decision-making. This, in turn, increases the precision and speed at which organisations can innovate.
– Advancement of tech and organisational initiatives: The capabilities of identity security can accelerate and de-risk significant technology transformations and modernization efforts such as cloud migrations by standardising and accelerating infrastructure provisioning, contractor onboarding, workload migration, security testing, and product integration.
– Efficiency gains: To minimise opportunities for human error and relieve burdens on IT, streamlined and automated identity governance processes, such as access provisioning, reviews, and certification can play a big role. Additionally, they significantly reduce the amount of time frontline managers spend on compliance. These efficiency gains will continue to grow with adoption of advanced capabilities such as AI-enabled, self-service portals that can utilise peer group analysis and identity attributes to automatically fulfil user access requests or flag them for further review.
– Risk reduction and compliance enablement: Failing to prevent even a single significant breach can translate into hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue and regulatory fines. Beyond monetary concerns, consumer and partner trust can be severely compromised by a single breach. Foundational identity security capabilities only accelerate incident response, prevent bad actors from authenticating into internal systems, and limit excessive access rights for employees. However, more advanced, AI-driven capabilities continuously monitor user activity, detect unusual behaviour, alert security teams to potential attacks, and enforce response measures in real-time. They can also manage every single identity in the organisation, including employees, non-employees and machine identities, and reduce the burden of compliance by decreasing the number and severity of compliance issues through automated logging and report generation.
Getting buy-in from senior leadership
Senior executives often view identity security as a technology matter, overlooking its direct impact on their business agendas and identity advocates will need to tailor their messages to align with decision-makers’ priorities in order to be successful. For a CEO, the focus might be on how identity investment accelerates product innovation. The CFO may be interested in ensuring segregation of duties to prevent fraud, while the Chief Data Officer & Chief Privacy Officer benefit from understanding how digital identity technologies support data-driven marketing, enhance data visibility, and ensure compliance with privacy regulations. With the rise in AI adoption, organisations are appointing AI champions to understand the transformative capabilities of AI-enabled identity security while safeguarding against potential risks. This personalised approach could significantly increase the chances of executive buy-in and support for identity security initiatives.
