By Byron V. Acohido
As we approach the close of the second decade of the 21st century, it’s stunning, though perhaps not terribly surprising, that abused logon credentials continue to fuel the never-ending escalation of cyber attacks.
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Dare we anticipate a slowing — and ultimately the reversal – of this trend? Yes, I believe that’s now in order.
I say this because tools that give companies the wherewithal to make granular decisions about any specific access request – and more importantly, to react in just the right measure — are starting to gain notable traction.
For the past four years or so, leading security vendors have been championing the so-called Zero Trust approach to network architectures. All of this evangelizing of a “never trust, always verify” posture has incrementally gained converts among early-adopter enterprises.
PortSys is a US-based supplier of advanced identity and access management (IAM) systems and has been a vocal proponent of Zero Trust. I recently had the chance to visit with PortSys CEO Michael Oldham, and came away with a better grasp of how Zero Trust is playing out in the marketplace.
He also reinforced a notion espoused by other security vendors I’ve interviewed that Zero Trust is well on its way to being a game changer. Key takeaways from our discussion:
Entrenched challenges
It takes a cascade of logons to interconnect the on-premises and cloud-based systems that enterprises rely on to deliver digital commerce as we’ve come to know and love it. And it remains true that each digital handshake is prone to being maliciously manipulated by a threat actor, be it a criminal in possession of stolen credentials or a disgruntled insider with authorized access.
To be sure, advances have come along in IAM technologies over the past two decades. Yet, high-profile breaches persist. Some 78% of networks were breached in 2018, based on CyberEdge’s poll of IT pros in 17 countries. What’s more, an IBM/Ponemon study pegs the global average cost of a data breach at $3.86 million, and predicts a 28 percent likelihood of a victimized organization sustaining a recurring breach in the next two years.
This has to do with entrenched investments in legacy security systems, such as traditional firewalls and malware detection systems that were originally designed to protect on-premise systems. As remote access, mobile devices and cloud computing (more…)
