Identity Analytics: A Way Towards a Secure and Smarter Future
By Sharad Singh, Digital Marketing Engineer
In any organization, it is important to ensure that the right person has access to the right data and resources when they need it. It is also necessary that the wrong or unauthorized people don’t get access to that information. Well, this sounds quite simple. However, it is very complicated. The identity and access management (IAM) field is very diverse and unfortunately, there is no big button to press that will solve all your IAM requirements. One of the biggest issues that large organizations face is the difficulty in keeping a track of all the IAM data, which is leading to security risks, operational inefficiencies, loss of data, and failure to abide by regulatory standards. This is because large companies have thousands of employees with various roles. Here is where identity analytics (IA) comes into play. It’s an emerging set of big data and advanced analytics to increase risk awareness associated with identity and enhance IAM methods such as access certification, access request, and role management.
Identity analytics allows an organization to keep continuous track of who has access to what resources within itself, thereby helping it achieve business development and efficient risk management. It helps administrators to be more dynamic with constant monitoring of the identity aura. IA also develops behavioral baselines of a user’s activity and identifies oddities from those baselines. By knowing the baseline and abnormal behavior, companies can attain compliance with useful and meaningful insights about the activities of users at every stage of user access life cycle. General user activities include requesting access to applications, logging into applications, and accessing data in file sharing systems.
Identity analytics has been developing since the last decade. It is still on the development phase as companies all over the world are realizing that traditional methods and tools for cyber security have been ruled out and can even become harmful by exposing the companies to risks they cannot identify and prevent.
The identity analytics market witnesses and is likely to attain a prolific growth in the coming years. The growth is driven by factors such as an increase in adoption by enterprises to improve their identity and access management systems, growing need to ensure adaptive access certification by the enterprises and rise in awareness about regulation and compliance management. However, there a few challenges faced by the market that include increasing complexity of the IT infrastructure and slow adoption of advanced analytics solutions in the underdeveloped regions. On the other hand, adoption of AI, Machine learning technologies in identity analytics solutions as well as rising demand for mobility solutions and growing identity theft are likely to offer lucrative opportunities for growth of the identity analytics market.
On an end note, the reason why identity analytics is important and why organizations should invest in it is that it greatly helps in assessing risks and ensuring security by proper identity and access management. Using IA can help an organization embrace a future that is smarter, more effective, and secure.