July 2023 Summaries

Microsoft has announced a rebranding of Azure AD and related products under the Microsoft Entra product family to consolidate its identity and access management capabilities. The company also introduced two new services targeting the Secure Services Edge market, Entra Internet Access and Entra Private Access. Microsoft emphasized that existing renamed products' capabilities, licensing plans, and APIs would remain unchanged. This move reflects Microsoft's recognition of the importance of identity in modern security solutions, with CISO Bret Arsenault stating, "Identity is the new perimeter." The shift to an identity-based security approach acknowledges that traditional network boundaries no longer provide meaningful protection for data spread across various systems and devices. Veza, an identity security platform, expands visibility and control of the identity perimeter by providing a full view of the entire identity attack surface, including cloud infrastructure, data warehouses, on-premise systems, and SaaS apps.

Veza has released several updates and enhancements to its platform over the past month. These include new features such as Segregation of Duty (SoD) Analysis for complex queries, Query Builder improvements for showing or hiding nested relationships, and the ability to edit report owners. Additionally, there are new filter operators, saved query improvements, and integrations with AWS Secrets Manager, Confluence Cloud, and Windows Servers. Veza Workflows have also seen mobile improvements, usability enhancements, and improved performance. Lastly, updates to Permissions filters for Workflows, Graph, and Query Builder, as well as collapsible search sidebars, have been made for better user experience.

Blackstone, a leading global investment firm, has partnered with Veza to revolutionize IGA (Identity Governance and Administration) by incorporating automation and intelligence. The collaboration aims to address the growing security challenges faced by organizations, including data protection, cloud security, ransomware protection, and insider threats. Veza's approach focuses on identity security as the root of all these initiatives, with a particular emphasis on answering three critical questions: who has access to what, what can they do with that access, and should they even have the access in the first place? By combining previously siloed access permission data and extracting intelligence from relationships, Veza aims to solve for various security and governance initiatives. The partnership between Blackstone and Veza highlights the need for modernizing identity management beyond traditional IAM (Identity Access Management) tooling to truly understand identity access in today's complex digital landscape.

Phil Venables has been appointed to Veza's Board of Directors, bringing over 35 years of experience in leading security initiatives and large teams at global technology companies. His leadership will be crucial for Veza as it tackles a significant market opportunity in Identity Security. The company is revolutionizing traditional IAM by addressing the complexity arising from multiple identity systems across cloud and on-premise environments. Veza's platform monitors millions of permissions, helping organizations secure access to sensitive data anywhere and everywhere. With Phil Venables joining the board, Veza continues its mission to build the future of Identity Security.

The principle of least privilege is crucial for securing enterprise systems and data. It involves granting each identity the minimum system resources and authorizations needed to perform its function. Implementing this principle effectively can protect against compromised identities, human error, and insider attacks by limiting the damage that can be caused by unauthorized access. However, achieving least privilege is challenging due to scale, complexity, visibility issues, and productivity concerns. Manual access reviews are ineffective at reducing excess privileges, highlighting the need for automated tools like Veza's Identity Security platform to improve access governance and achieve least privilege.