Navigating the New Perimeter

As corporate employees are now regularly accessing their enterprise applications and data from mobile devices and cloud applications, the traditional idea of the enterprise network boundary is vanishing. Enterprises are grappling with the reality where the network perimeter is defined by the employee identity. Securing this “Identity Perimeter” and managing identities’ access to applications and mobile devices has become a complicated calculus.

Along with the push to the cloud, hackers have increased their use of the tried-and-true techniques of using phishing and account takeover schemes to capture enterprise data. The financial costs of attacks continue to grow. According to the 2015 Ponemon Institute study, the typical breach costs organizations $3.5 million — a one year rise of 15 percent in cost.

The CISO’s job to make sure their organization doesn’t incur the cost of a breach and loss of sensitive information— as such, their primary concern is securing information wherever it may reside. The CIO must prioritize solutions with ease of integration, rapid execution, and immediate scalability. Cloud solutions provide greater productivity and security. We live in an interesting time: now both the CISO and CIO can leverage the tools they need to bring about successful change from the same cloud solutions. At Okta, we are already seeing this demonstrated by innovative leaders at companies like MGM Resorts and Adobe.

Both MGM and Adobe are using contextual data about users, devices, and patterns of behavior to accurately track unauthorized access. Moreover, they are doing so in a way that doesn’t interfere with the business performance of a mobile, connected workforce. These companies understand that it is critical for IT to mirror that shift to a model where they are able to accurately audit the context of the data access (the who, what, where, how, when, why, and by how much) to effectively protect the business.

With data moving to the cloud, security teams are only able to see a fraction of activity on its own internal systems and need partners like Okta with comprehensive log analytics for deep insights into authentication activity. Navigating the new perimeter doesn’t mean companies need to sacrifice security for productivity.