Identity breaches continue to be disclosed at a staggering rate, and if organizations don't already have identity management best practices in place, they are already behind the curve. Last year, IDSA’s Trends in Security Digital Identities showed that 84% of respondents had experienced an identity-related breach in the past year. 96% indicated that they could have prevented or minimized the breach by implementing identity-focused security outcomes, which is why it is critical for organizations to protect the digital identities of everyone they work with, including employees, contractors, third parties, customers, consumers and machines. They can do this by following the best practices outlined below, which have been developed by technology vendors and security providers who understand the importance of identity-centric security. Security leaders can enable and enforce many of these best practices through multi-factor authentication (MFA) and other identity and access management (IAM) tools.
Today, infrastructure, applications, directories and networks are widely dispersed across on-premises and disparate cloud environments. If security leaders want to secure their organization’s assets, they need to know what the assets are and where they are located. There is simply no way to protect assets of which they are unaware.