5 Ways to Boost Security with Identity

Ping Identity

By: Jordan Griffith, PMM Ping Identity

Ready to champion your digital transformation? Identity security helps you provide seamless customer experiences and enable your workforce to work from anywhere, at any time, on any device. Let's take a look at five ways your organization can leverage identity to increase your security posture, all while keeping your customers happy and helping your employees be more productive.

1. Put multi-factor authentication everywhere.

   The average cost of a data breach in the U.S. is $8.19M and $3.92M globally. ¹ (But yours isn't an average size business, is it?) 52% of data breaches are due to hacking, and of those, 80% are due to weak or compromised passwords. ² Multi-factor authentication (MFA) can reduce password risk by 99.9%. ³ Putting MFA everywhere is a no-brainer.

2. Enforce least-privilege access.

   Consumer data privacy and regulations are top of mind as more cases of data misuse come to light. 23% of sensitive data breaches are caused by internal employees, ⁴ so they shouldn't have access to everything just because they're on the network. To mitigate risk, enforce least-privileged access and establish Zero Trust security for apps, APIs and data.

3. Empower application admins.

   By 2020, a third of successful attacks on enterprises will be on their shadow IT resources. ⁵ Centralized identity and access management (IAM) forces app teams to make IT aware of a resource when they want to use identity services. But if it's a hassle, they'll avoid this step. Establish a central IAM operating portal with delegated administration, so business users can help themselves to security.

4. Consolidate to centralized IAM.

   Over time, silos of IAM solutions have built up across your organization, often due to shadow IT or M&A activity. IT security and IAM teams struggle to keep these systems on their radar and propagate security policy changes in response to new threats. You need an IAM platform that lets you rationalize legacy systems and reduce your overall attack surface.

5. Automate low-value, manual tasks

   IAM and IT security professionals should be spending their time on projects that boost security. Instead, they're wasting time on password resets, fulfilling onboarding and administration requests from app owners, and customizing legacy tools. Shifting to a solution that leverages automation and self-service lets IT spend their time where it counts—mitigating risks.

1. Ponemon 2019 Cost of a Data Breach Report
2. Verizon 2019 Data Breach Investigations Report
3. Microsoft Security Intelligence Report, 2018
4. Forrester Analytics Global Business Technographics Security Survey, 2019
5. Gartner's Top 10 Security Predictions, 2016