July 2022 Summaries

The Identiverse 2022 conference provided an opportunity for companies to assess their security and identity measures after the rapid shift to cloud during the pandemic. Veza conducted a survey at its booth, with 164 Identity, IAM, and IT executives participating. Key findings include: - Companies are moving to the cloud proactively rather than reactively, with top reasons being data migration (29%) and adoption of multi-cloud approach (27%). - Risk reduction is the primary business driver for budget allocation in security initiatives. - 44% of respondents claimed they can view and control permissions to data systems for every identity throughout their organization, with those adopting cloud through migration of data showing higher rates (nearly 45%) than those with more complex multi-cloud migrations (37%). - The majority of companies review/audit identity permissions quarterly (37%), while only a few audit annually or less. Companies that audit weekly have the highest confidence in their data security policies, with 45% feeling very confident.

The pandemic has accelerated cloud adoption among businesses as remote work becomes more prevalent and compliance laws become stricter. Many organizations have migrated data to the cloud, adopted multi-cloud approaches, and are adopting cloud-native data solutions. However, with increased cloud adoption comes a growing number of identities to manage, including employees, contractors, partners, service accounts, bots, and APIs. A strong identity foundation is crucial for maintaining access control in this rapidly evolving landscape. Many companies have implemented basic authentication concepts such as single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA), and cloud-based user directories, but few are enforcing MFA. This has led to a high number of identity-related breaches in recent years. To improve security, organizations should focus on continuous monitoring and tweaking existing solutions while also considering data management and authorization permissions across multi-cloud environments.