The Bottom Line: Identity and Access Management (IAM) has always been a priority area for most enterprises. HFS’s recent study has shown sixty percent (60%) of IT executives will continue to invest in strengthening their IAM environment. This is good news and a clear sign that most enterprises are considering IAM as a critical component of their overall zero trust strategy. But cybersecurity executives are still facing operational challenges when it comes to deploying effective security mechanisms across the enterprise, enabling a cost-effective support model and providing a truly seamless user experience. Despite these challenges, this is not the time for you, the CISO, to throw up your hands in despair. This is the time to double down on your commitment to protect your identities, and ultimately your data.
Our latest Cybersecurity Pulse study shows enterprises are still struggling to stay in control of their overall identity and access management environment.
- Digital authentication remains a big challenge. Eighty-four percent (84%) of respondents are struggling to manage non-human identities and underlying digital authentication credentials. Securing non-human identities is without any doubt a challenging job, especially when we add the complexity of multi and hybrid cloud environments. There are generally far more non-human identities than human identities across the cloud estate and the worrying news is that a vast majority of enterprises are not consistently enforcing least privilege security controls across such identities, leaving them exposed to serious security threats.
- Most enterprises have realized that going passwordless can significantly help them enforce enhanced security standards and improve user experience. Passwordless authentication is trending up, especially for SaaS, becoming the industry standard. But our latest HFS cybersecurity study showed that eighty-three percent (83%) of cybersecurity executives still face challenges establishing passwordless authentication mechanisms since most of them have tackled passwordless as an overnight destination rather than a well-thought-out journey.
- Eighty-two percent (82%) of cybersecurity executives highlighted that the delegation of IAM administration activities to external service providers remains a challenge. Many of them have flagged the lack of technical expertise (IAM domain and product expertise) combined with a limited understanding of compliance requirements and their significance.
- Identifying and mitigating access risks in an Operational Technology (OT) environment is not straightforward due to the large number of disparate assets and the distributed nature of such environment. It is not surprising to see that eighty-one percent (81%) of enterprises are experiencing difficulties with managing IAM for assets that are part of OT network(s) and infrastructure(s).
- The majority of enterprises are still facing IAM challenges associated with the adoption and deployment of cloud and SaaS applications. Seventy-nine percent (79%) of respondents reported that staying in control of identities and access rights to cloud-based applications remains a key challenge.
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