The transition to a remote and hybrid workforce happened fast during a time of uncertainty, and IT professionals rose to the challenge with ingenuity and dedication. But two years in, many IT teams are still responding with patchwork solutions to enforce identity and access management (IAM) across a newly decentralized, multiple-endpoint ecosystem. It’s clear that new IAM strategies are needed to accommodate these major shifts in the workplace, as well as meet new organizational priorities and user expectations.
In that spirit of discovery, we’re looking forward to joining the IAM community at the Gartner Identity & Access Management Summit, August 22 to 24, 2022, in Las Vegas, Nevada. We’ll be sharing some of Microsoft’s recent insights about strengthening lifecycle and permissions management, stopping attacks on identity infrastructure, and moving to a cloud-based identity platform. With the recently announced Microsoft Entra, identity threat detection and response (ITDR), and our security information and event management (SIEM) and extended detection and response (XDR) solutions, we’re committed to providing end-to-end protection for your organization. Be sure to visit Microsoft Booth #304 and connect with our frontline defenders.
Gartner IAM Summit—Microsoft sessions
We’re excited to meet with our customers, colleagues, and peers at the 2022 Gartner Identity & Access Management Summit. Microsoft will present three research-backed sessions led by senior product managers, including a special look at ITDR led by Alex Weinert, Director of Identity Security at Microsoft.
Title: Manage, Secure, and Govern Identities Across Multicloud Infrastructures
Speaker: Balaji Parimi, Partner General Manager
Date/Time: Monday, August 22, 2022 | 11:45 AM to 12:15 PM PT
Synopsis: Going multicloud makes you more agile and resilient. But it also creates more complexity and blind spots for your security and identity teams. It’s time to reimagine how we manage, secure, and govern identities, and enforce least-privileged access consistently across cloud platforms. In this session, we’ll explore how cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) can strengthen your Zero Trust security in a multicloud world.
Title: Beyond the Firewall: Upgrading from On-Premises to the Microsoft Cloud Identity
Speaker: Brjann Brekkan, Group Program Manager, Identity and Network Access
Date/Time: Monday, August 22, 2022 | 1:15 PM to 1:35 PM PT
Synopsis: Today’s new normal of “work from anywhere” and “on any device” has exposed the challenges of using on-premises authentication technologies and platforms as the control plane for enterprise applications and collaboration. You’re invited to join the Microsoft Identity product group for this interactive session. We’ll discuss the latest trends and platform capabilities to accelerate and simplify the journey of adopting a modern cloud-based identity platform.
Title: Identity Threat Prevention, Detection, and Response—Essential Defenses for a New Generation of Attacks
Speaker: Alex Weinert, Director of Identity Security
Date/Time: Tuesday, August 23, 2022 | 11:15 AM to 11:45 AM PT
Synopsis: Attacks against identity infrastructure are accelerating. Instead of trying to compromise individual accounts, today’s attackers seek to gain unrestricted access to multicloud environments and workloads wherever they’re deployed. For that reason, protecting accounts is not enough—organizations need robust protections for the identity infrastructure itself. In this session, we’ll share how Microsoft envisions the future of ITDR, including what an effective identity and security collaboration should look like to help your organization grow fearlessly.
Bridging the IAM and SOC divide
Even as we approach another IAM summit, many organizations are still shocked to learn the reality of how most identity breaches occur. According to the 2022 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, 65 percent of breaches are caused by credential misuse, while only 4 percent caused are by system vulnerabilities.1 A full 82 percent of breaches involve the human element, including social engineering attacks, user errors, and data misuse.
As I will discuss in my Tuesday session, ITDR offers a way of reimagining the scope and collaboration between the SOC and identity admins that can help stop more of these credential-based attacks. IAM requires a lot of the same telemetry and inventory that SOC teams have, but the two groups rarely share tools. That’s because each team buys tools for different reasons. Operations and identity admins want stable, predictable operations and high uptime. Security analysts aren’t concerned with uptime; they care about identifying threats. In other words, IAM is mostly focused on letting only the good guys in, but it also needs an equal capability for keeping the bad guys out.
So, how do we reduce that staggering 65 percent of breaches that result from account-takeover attacks? And how do we know if and when the architecture itself is faulty? The solution lies in unifying more signals and more controls into a holistic solution. Microsoft is positioned to bridge the chasm between SOC and IAM because Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is already the foundation identity that so many organizations rely on. In addition, Microsoft Sentinel provides a cloud-native SIEM and SOAR solution with built-in user entity and behavior analytics (UEBA), while Microsoft Defender provides XDR capabilities for user environments, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides XDR for infrastructure and multicloud platforms.
Microsoft Entra: The way in is the way forward
Along with bridging the SOC and IAM relationship, Microsoft Entra is a vital component of Microsoft’s approach to ITDR. The products in the Entra family help provide secure access by providing IAM, CIEM, and identity verification in one solution.
Entra encompasses all of Microsoft’s existing IAM capabilities and integrates two new product categories: Microsoft Entra Permissions Management is a CIEM solution that empowers customers to discover, remediate, and monitor permission risks across all major public cloud platforms (such as Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform) from a unified interface. Microsoft Entra Verified ID provides a decentralized identity service based on open standards, safeguarding your organization by allowing admins to seamlessly customize and issue verifiable credentials in all your apps and services.
Microsoft is working with our customers to reimagine IAM for our new decentralized workplace, and we’re committed to providing end-to-end protection for your organization with Microsoft Entra and SIEM and XDR. We look forward to meeting with you at Gartner Identity & Access Management Summit, August 22 to 24, 2022, in Las Vegas, Nevada. Be sure to stop and chat with us at Microsoft Booth #304.
To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.
12022 Data Breach Investigations Report, Verizon. 2022.
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