The COVID-19 pandemic sparked change in the world, for better or worse (depending on how it is viewed). Taking the pandemic into account as well as business transformations that include mergers and acquisitions, there is a continuous widespread shift toward remote work and public cloud services. However, this also resulted in a larger attack surface for cyber threats, specifically those targeting identities within organizations.

To effectively combat these identity-related threats, cybersecurity teams must prioritize the security of all identities with access to critical assets and resources, not just privileged identities. A comprehensive Identity Security strategy based on least privilege access is crucial for enhancing an organization's cyber resilience and protecting against identity-based attacks.

CyberArk, a provider of identity security, wanted to see the correlation between the completeness of the four tenets and Identity Security maturity in its recent report. The four tenets are identity security tools, integration, automation and continuous threat detection and response.

Organizations on an identity security journey generally fall one of into four levels.

• Level 1: Novice organizations severely lag in three of the four tenets.
• Level 2: Aspiring organizations lag in two of the four tenets. 
• Level 3: Maturing organizations lag in one of the four tenets. 
• Level 4: Transformative organizations are the most mature with a near complete strategy across all four tenets. 

Based on the report, the data-driven Identity Security Maturity Model identifies 9% of organizations as transformative organizations, or those with the most mature and holistic identity security strategies. These transformative organizations have a well-rounded focus on implementing Identity Security tools, are inherently agile and display a “fail fast, learn faster” characteristic, even in times of a successful cybersecurity attack.

On the other side of the spectrum, nearly half (42%) of all respondents’ identity security programs are in the earliest stage of maturity.

For those Level 1 organizations, this means that they invest in fewer identity security tools and severely lag in integrating and automating them across their environment. These organizations generally lack the confidence to mitigate identity-related risks in a timely manner and typically take several hours or days to weeks to respond to audit requests.

Level 2 organizations are aspiring organizations that understand the criticality of securing all identities throughout their organization. Thus, they have deployed more identity security tools and have started the progress to integrate and automate these tools throughout their environment. Additionally, they are detecting and responding to a broader range of identity-related threats. Yet, they still lack foundational tools and integrations to quickly mitigate identity-related risk.

Those organizations in the earliest stages need to utilize the approach taken by transformative organizations, which reached the pinnacle of maturity having embraced a unified approach to identity security.

“The main focus for organizations looking to adopt a mature holistic Identity Security strategy is to secure access for all identities - human and machine - by breaking down silos and adopting a consolidated and automated approach for identity security,” said Amita Potnis, Director, Thought Leadership Marketing, CyberArk. “Our research indicates that many have already begun investing in this journey, with 24% of organizations committing more than 10% of their overall cybersecurity budget to their Identity Security programs this year."

CyberArk’s Identity Security Platform embodies that approach and offers intelligent privilege controls for human and machine identities. It provides continuous threat detection and prevention across the entire identity lifecycle, allowing organizations to enable Zero Trust and least privilege with complete visibility.

By utilizing CyberArk, organizations can ensure secure access to any resource from anywhere, by any identity. This breakthrough in identity security has major implications for organizations seeking to enhance their security posture and protect sensitive information.