5 Major Trends in Identity Access Management in 2021
Companies’ security leaders face increasingly complex IAM (Identity Access Management) challenges as they emphasize customer-facing engagements and more of their employees demand to work remotely. Of course, having employees access systems from outside the facility drastically increases the security risk. Many organizations lack the skills and resources to mitigate these risks. Because of this, there will be a trend toward utilizing managed security service providers (MSSPs) to deliver IAM services. Gartner predicts that “by 2023, 40% of IAM application convergence will primarily be driven by MSSPs that focus on delivery of best-of-breed solutions in an integrated approach, providing advice, guidance and integration recommendations, shifting influence from product vendors to service partners.”
These are the 5 Major Trends:
Increased utilization of Cybersecurity Mesh
Cybersecurity mesh, which allows the security to be defined around the identity of a person or thing, will support more than 50% of IAM requests and more and more companies will utilize MSSPs.
“By 2025, cybersecurity mesh will support more than half of all IAM requests, enabling a more explicit, mobile and adaptive unified access management model. The mesh model of cybersecurity provides a more integrated, scalable, flexible and reliable approach to digital asset access control than traditional security perimeter controls.” (Gartner Group)
“More and more, organizations will rely on MSSP firms for advice, guidance and integration recommendations. By 2023, 40% of IAM application convergence will primarily be driven by MSSPs that focus on delivery of best-of-breed solutions in an integrated approach, shifting influence from product vendors to service partners.” (Gartner Group)
Enhanced usage of Biometrics
As per Veritis, the global biometric market would reach an estimated value of $50 billion by the end of 2024. Perhaps one of the rapidly emerging trends in the IAM sector, biometrics (retinal scans, facial recognition systems, and fingerprints), is highly preferred for ensuring authorized users in networked systems. However, there are risks inherent to this approach also because biometric information can be stolen and used for fraudulent operations. While a regular password can be changed if compromised, a user’s biometrics can’t be changed and permanent. To counterbalance this threat, the future trend would involve IAM, which relies on biometric data, to get an additional layer of security for protecting the biometric information. On a related note, demographic bias within identity proofing will be widely minimized as organization demand that vendors prove efforts to minimize such biases in their algorithms.
Evolvement of Single Sign-On Systems and Multi-Factor Authentication
While MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) is one of the most popular IAM practices, there is still plenty of room for improvement as data breaches still occur and cause substantial revenue losses. Adaptive Authentication is the advanced version of MFA, which relies on machine learning capabilities to detect malicious user behavior or illegal entry. Adaptive Authentication pulls in all the details of user login in terms of login time, device, location, browser, and other data, which helps analyze a login attempt’s authenticity. Based on the analysis, if a login attempt turns out to be fishy, the system will ask the user to fill in an MFA to be authenticated. Another popular IAM industry trend is Single Sign-on (SSO System) usage with MFA that helps users leverage a unified, singular set of credentials to gain access to networks, data, applications, web, and the cloud. Expect these technologies to continue to improve. (Veritis)
Wider Adoption of Artificial Intelligence in IAM
Context-based identity is responsible for comparing data about a user who needs to be vetted to authenticate an identity. This data includes numerous behavioral patterns like physical location, IP address, usage, preferences, and machine address. Leveraging AI programming algorithms for data mining helps discover data patterns that are extremely helpful in reducing fraud and identifying risks, a technique which has been highly useful in banking systems across the globe. (Veritis)
Identity Access Management for Cloud Services
As organizations shift to cloud services to provide advantages such as efficiency, scalability, and flexibility and while the cloud can bring many benefits, there are security concerns that should not be ignored. It is essential to employ a secure digital strategy like Cloud User Access Management Software, also known as User Access Management (UAM). Through this system, organizations can create authorized logins for users to access crucial data and applications. (Veritis)
Article by Craig Boulet, IT Consultant
Contact Craig - Craig@coregroupresources.com