January 2023 Summaries

Instant messaging systems like Slack play a crucial role in modern businesses, facilitating communication and decision-making among employees. These conversations often contain sensitive information that needs protection. In this episode of Into the VezaVerse, experts demonstrate how Veza can help securely collaborate on Slack by tracking privileged users, managing guest accounts, and ensuring access control through an Identity Provider (IdP). To integrate Slack with Veza, visit their Github page.

In this month's Veza Voice newsletter, several updates and features are highlighted. Activity Monitoring for Snowflake is now available, allowing users to identify and remove dormant permissions by understanding activity at the data object level. This feature also includes an Over-Provisioned Score (OPS) to prioritize clean-up efforts. New integrations for Coupa, Oracle Fusion Cloud, and Salesforce have been added, expanding the reach of Veza's Authorization Graph. Additionally, new tips and tricks on using Veza Rules are provided to help maintain corporate security controls by tracking risks and monitoring authorization changes in your environment. Finally, upcoming events such as Gartner IAM, Gasparilla Pirate Fest 2023, CloudWerx Event GCP, and NCAA Event are mentioned for users interested in meeting the Veza team.

Veza's approach to building an authorization platform differs from other companies in the Identity-First Security market by utilizing an out-of-band architecture instead of an in-line one. The in-line approach, which involves a proxy or agent sitting between data and users, is believed to have four fatal flaws: slow deployment due to security reviews, downtime risk, new points of failure, and increased policy complexity. Veza's out-of-band solution pulls metadata from APIs, leverages existing authorization policies and systems, and avoids the issues associated with in-line architecture. This approach is faster to deploy, has no downtime risk or new points of failure, and reduces policy complexity by helping users understand and manage their authorization policies more effectively.

Veza is a security platform focused on empowering users to answer vital questions about data access and permissions. It ingests authorization data from various sources, including identity providers (IdPs), cloud providers, and data assets themselves, and normalizes this complex metadata into "effective permissions." By connecting your data sources to Veza's authorization platform, you can visualize identity-to-data relationships, monitor for misconfigurations and violations, and conduct entitlement reviews. To include unique applications in the control plane for authorization, Veza offers an Open Authorization API (OAA), which enables organizations to integrate their own custom application's metadata directly into the platform.

Gartner's analysis on security spending projects that critical market segments, including data security, identity access management, and cloud security, will reach a combined spend of ~$30 billion in 2023, representing ~20% YoY growth. AWS predicts organizations moving to "continuous security and compliance" and emphasizes the importance of managing identities and permissions. Key predictions for 2023 include an increase in Russian-led cyberattacks targeting Western organizations, a rise in China's IP theft in the United States, consolidation in security through M&A, CISOs tackling security in data lakes, identity-first security taking off in enterprises, and the emergence of a lingua franca for authorization.