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When it comes to cybersecurity, it’s not a matter of whether you’ll be targeted, but rather when and how. Simply being a target is now a given. As security threats become more sophisticated and data breaches more frequent, security and identity leaders must remain vigilant and stay ahead of the curve. In 2023, we’re not surprised to see the convergence of identity and security playing a crucial role in many of the top trends analysts are predicting, with platform consolidation not only topping the list, but facilitating the implementation of other widely adopted security trends.
In this blog post, we’ll explore some of the top trends in cybersecurity for 2023 and how security and identity leaders can leverage the Transmit Security Platform in order to stay ahead of the curve.
Topping the list of key trends is platform consolidation, which many leaders are embracing to not only eliminate security blind spots and improve decisioning, but also reduce complexity in order to enable more agile threat response, using open and interoperable standards and approaches for centralized management and effective collaboration.
By providing a full set of natively integrated identity security services, including the only CIAM platform-native identity verification service on the market, businesses can benefit from secure account opening and risk-based authentication, build scalable user stores across business lines and channels, reduce friction for trusted users and orchestrate step-ups to challenge risky users throughout the customer lifecycle.
In addition, a practical approach is needed to enable consolidation, which can be achieved with identity orchestration or journey-time orchestration — an increasingly critical capability that Transmit Security was first to market with. Our innovative approach enables security and identity leaders to orchestrate disperate and siloed solutions that make up their identity security stacks. By successfully orchestrating the full identity stack, security and identity leaders can off-ramp legacy technologies with an eye toward platform consolidation.
From a CIAM perspective, cybersecurity validation involves testing, assessing and continuously monitoring the effectiveness of an organization’s identity management, authentication, fraud detection and identity verification measures. Here, consolidated security platforms like those offered by Transmit Security not only provide business benefits in their own right, but facilitate validation of identity security controls by providing a comprehensive view of how identity decisioning logic impacts cybersecurity, with real-time monitoring and response to potential threats.
In addition, Transmit Security’s Detection and Response Services leverage the expertise of our in-house Security Research Labs. With deep backgrounds in fraud, malware research, incident response, identity and overall cybersecurity, our researchers combine threat intelligence and data science to not only research the latest tools, tactics and techniques used by fraudsters to evade security measures, but reverse-engineer attacks and apply their findings to optimize the frameworks used in statistical detection models and train and tune ML algorithms.
With this knowledge, updates to our models are made on a continuous basis to ensure that detection methods stay up-to-date and can detect emerging threat patterns in real time, without the need for our customers to make any changes to their applications.
Traditionally, cybersecurity was viewed as a cost center and, at times, a barrier to organizational productivity. That perspective has changed with the realization that cybersecurity can be a key driver of value creation. By building comprehensive profiles of trusted users, businesses can more easily distinguish between legitimate and malicious users, reducing friction that can lead to dropoffs while strengthening security – not compromising on it. Ultimately, security and risk leaders have a responsibility to establish and maintain trust in all entities they conduct legitimate transactions with, including customers, citizens, contractors, partners and even gig-economy workers.
Transmit Security enables this by underpinning our customer identity and access management services with a best-in-class risk engine that enables businesses to orchestrate real-time security measures based on the full context of user behaviors across apps and channels to reduce friction for trusted users by eliminating the need for cumbersome OTPs, silently authenticating across business lines, extending sessions and other measures, resulting in improved enrollment and more conversions.
Due to factors such as increased regulatory scrutiny, heightened public awareness of cyber threats, and the potential financial and reputational damage that data breaches can bring, boards are taking more explicit responsibility for cybersecurity. However, in order to demonstrate how cybersecurity initiatives and programs are impacting the larger goals and objectives of the business, cybersecurity leaders must be able to effectively communicate with C-level executives and senior management.
However, communicating the impact of CIAM controls on other business goals and objectives requires the ability to understand and easily test decisioning logic, as well as adapt that logic quickly to meet changing needs. This is difficult with many traditional CIAM tools as the decisioning logic for identity security can be quite complex, due to the need to stitch together multiple detection tools and a patchwork of IDPs and third-party databases, either heuristically or via machine-learning algorithms that are often black boxes.
Our Detection and Response Services facilitate collaboration and communication between security and identity decision-makers and board members both by simplifying and centralizing decisioning logic and through increased transparency into the machine-learning algorithms that govern that logic. Furthermore, with the ability to easily understand decisioning logic, teams can quickly implement custom business rules via API, prioritize rules to control the order in which they are evaluated and test their impact in preview mode to see how they are impacting other KPIs before deploying them.
As applications become increasingly complex, the modern enterprise attack surface continues to expand. To address this issue, businesses need to implement continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) programs. These programs continually refine threat management to keep up with evolving work practices, using a five-stage process that can be easily implemented on the Transmit Security Platform.
The identity fabric refers to the interconnected systems and processes that govern how identities are managed within an organization. As this fabric becomes more complex, the risk of incomplete, misconfigured, or vulnerable elements increases. Note that these identities include both human and machine entities (i.e. software, containers, workloads, devices, legitimate bots and AI agents).
When it comes to one critical aspect of IAM, the implementation of Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) solutions designed to ensure the integrity of the identity fabric are often fragmented across multiple IDPs, third-party services and user directories, increasing — rather than decreasing — security blind spots that can lead to identity-based attacks.
In addition, legacy technologies like LDAP and active directories do not scale well, resulting in added latency and slow response times that can significantly degrade the consumer experience. This is a result of repurposing 1990s technology to meet today’s needs. LDAP, active directories and other legacy user stores were built to respond to decades-old enterprise needs. Digital business today cannot rely on outdated technology that is simply patched to enable CIAM.
Transmit Security is built from the ground up with high scale and rapid responsiveness in mind. With this approach, security and identity leaders are armed with responsive and scalable user stores that enable centralized visibility into risk signals. Finally, orchestration and consolidation of security controls across services and IDPs is dramatically simplified, thus reducing risks and giving security leaders much needed time back in their day.
The recent shift from monolithic to modern applications requires a new approach to security to secure components with undiscovered dependencies. Composable services require interoperability, modularity, and flexibility in security architectures and solutions to ensure that they can adapt to changing business needs through an ecosystem of independent systems and components that communicate with each other with the help of APIs.
In this regard, Transmit Security’s cloud-native, modular platform composed of natively integrated services enables security teams to easily choose and integrate different security services into their existing systems, ensuring that these services work seamlessly together, reducing the risk of compatibility issues or other problems that could compromise security.
Ultimately, placing the responsibility for strongly securing accounts onto users — whether they be the customers who access a business’s applications or the employees that access admin tools used to operate identity platform services — represents a risk to businesses when security controls add significant friction to the user experience.
Just like end users asked to follow best practices for securing accounts are bound to take shortcuts when those practices are excessively onerous, administrators asked to follow security guidelines that hinder their productivity are less likely to comply with those practices, resulting in vulnerabilities that put applications and their end users’ accounts at risk. To mitigate these risks, businesses are increasingly implementing human-centric security design, which prioritizes frictionless experiences to ensure compliance with security controls.
From an identity perspective, FIDO-based credentials enabled by Transmit Security’s Authentication Services provide a key component of this, providing a simplified, phishing-resistant authentication method that reduces the need for cumbersome passwords and other legacy authentication methods. In addition, Transmit Security offers enhanced passkeys security that prevents key leakage across shared devices that can compromise enterprise security controls.
Cybersecurity is an ever-evolving field that requires constant adaptation to stay ahead of the latest threats. By embracing these cybersecurity trends and coupling them with other emerging best practices, such as enhanced people management of security teams, businesses can improve their security posture, protect their assets, and minimize risk in an increasingly interconnected and digital world.
To find out more about how Transmit Security facilitates these and other security trends that are helping enterprises quickly adapt to a rapidly changing threat landscape, check out our rundown on how our platform fits in with some of this year’s analyst talks at Gartner IAM, or review our customer case studies to find out how our security-first identity platform has improved the security user experience of some of today’s largest enterprises.
