Tools for strengthening your Identity posture before authentication

Security leaders today need to adopt a comprehensive approach to Identity-powered cybersecurity that extends beyond multi-factor authentication (MFA) and single sign-on (SSO) to mitigate threats before, during, and after authentication-based attacks.

This approach begins pre-authentication with a strong Identity posture capable of discovering potential vulnerabilities and determining proper access.
 

Plain and simple: Managing the full lifecycle of authentication with individual point solutions delivers poor outcomes. Distributed oversight and poor integrations between apps and systems create information silos that exacerbate vulnerabilities and weaken the organization’s security posture. Security leaders need to go further than simply converging their Identity tools; they need to adopt a unified approach to Identity that offers better visibility, higher levels of control, and streamlined workloads.

How Okta unifies Identity

Okta elevates Identity security across the spectrum of posture, access, governance, and privileged access by centralizing and tightly integrating every aspect of Identity. By connecting seamlessly to your existing Identity providers (IdPs), SaaS, and on-prem apps, Okta addresses pre-authentication security use cases to deliver a holistic, intuitive view of your organization’s Identity security posture.

The result? Full visibility into the organization’s overall Identity security posture.

Here’s how we do it.

Strong risk management begins with a full awareness of where the risk is coming from, and what vulnerabilities it might exploit. Okta simplifies and strengthens the task of discovering Identity misconfigurations across the tech stack that have the potential to create negative security outcomes. For example, standing permissions and entitlements, administrator accounts, and SSO/MFA misconfigurations across SaaS applications, privileged accounts, and on-premises resources. 

This visibility into the organization’s roles, resources, and misconfigurations empowers security leaders to build the right secure-by-design access controls and policies that ensure the consistent application of a least-privilege standard.

Okta helps security leaders determine and maintain least-privilege access across the full breadth of your organization’s systems, applications, and resources. Here’s how.

• Better visibility: –– Get detailed overviews of user access levels to SaaS applications, privileged accounts, and on-premises resources through a centralized repository of core Identity information.
• Consistent (and powerful) access policy: –– Okta’s policies can help security leaders define what strong authentication looks like within the specific context of their organization, with the goal of building a least-privileged posture that minimizes the organization’s attack surface.
• Continuous monitoring: –– Okta Access Reviews allow administrators to continually ensure users have the right level of permissions for the right resources for the right amount of time. Okta also continually monitors Identity risk based on a range of shared third-party signals to arm security leaders with a holistic, real-time understanding of risk.
• Secure, efficient automation: –– Administrators can streamline their response processes with automatic responses in especially risky situations (for example, universal log out, removing permissions, etc.). 

The impact of unified Identity

Evaluating your organization’s Identity posture and determining proper access is too critical to trust fragmented Identity solutions that can undermine security and expose you to the worst impacts of cyber-attacks. Okta unifies every aspect of your Identity security, ensuring each element of your pre-authentication security structure is set up to proactively mitigate risk.
 

For more information on the other stages of threat protection, look for our blogs on the unified response to auth and post-auth security.