Cybersecurity Manager at Sempra Infrastructure

Through this article, Humberto Barreda emphasizes the importance of Identity and Access Management (IAM) in cybersecurity. It emphasizes that identity is the first perimeter of defense, especially as organizations increasingly adopt cloud services and SaaS solutions, which can lead to challenges in maintaining proper security controls.

Understanding Why Cybersecurity Begins and Ends with Identity Management

“Identity is the first perimeter of defense”

Cloud presence in organizations is increasing rapidly allowing users to promote SaaS as “unique” solutions to well-known problems, meaning that Shadow IT devours proper security controls in place to be assessed, where the Identity and Access could be the most important aspects to review.

SaaS solutions are being adopted among the company is they represent flexibility with no specific endpoint, meaning that BYOD is a common approach to use these services where access and data still rely on 100% in the client responsibility matrix, but encourage the organization to have a more comprehensible risk management framework for its use in the cloud.

  ​As organizations adopt cloud services and remote work becomes more common and accepted, traditional network perimeters become less relevant. Instead, security is increasingly focused on the identity of users and devices as the main control point for access 

Having an IAM program is fundamental within every organization as it controls who can access what resources, when, and how. Trackability along the whole lifecycle should allow to provide centralized visibility and control over user identities, permissions, and entitlements across cloud services and other platforms.

A solid IAM policy deployment and enforcement could provide the certainty of granting proper roles to users through technical mechanisms and controls, besides identifying excessive privileges, unused permissions, and potential security risks in applications, data, or any other resources.

About The Paradox

As organizations adopt cloud services and remote work becomes more common and accepted, traditional network perimeters become less relevant. Instead, security is increasingly focused on the identity of users and devices as the main control point for access.

Identity-centric security is the foundation of many cybersecurity strategies because it implies ensuring the right individuals have the right access to the right resources at the righttime for the right reasons, but it may be adaptative to changing threats and business needs whilst the first line of defense does its job without adding complexity almost impossible to handle (security vs usability).

Nevertheless, a comprehensive approach is needed as identity and access management is not sufficient by itself, but it requires also addressing other areas such as Incident Response, Data Protection, and Threat Intelligence.

Conclusion And Insights

Identity and Access Management Strategy needs to be robust, comprehensive, and adaptative whilst identity is considered a critical item within the attack surface. Nowadays, several security controls are Zero Trust Architecture based whereas these controls can demand to include:

• “Least Privilege” Principle

• “Need To Know” Principle

• Solid automated access governance

• RBAC & ABAC

• Implement UBA (user behavior analytics) for authentication and authorization

• Password less authentication

Whereas the Attack surface is evolving, at least the following controls should be in place for establishing and deploying an Identity-Centric Security Strategy that will allow us to strengthen the posture in Application Security, Data Governance, and users while building a foundation for more advanced security practices as it matures.