Organizations across the world face insider threats – malicious intruders gaining access to confidential data assets and mishandling the information. One recent example is a security breach committed by a US-based federal government employee, who allegedly leaked dozens of secret internal Pentagon documents. This case highlights why it is imperative for companies to adopt measures to effectively prevent such data leaks from happening again.
Veza, an Accel-backed data security startup, is helping businesses address this issue head-on by mapping data access and preventing potential insider threats. Their AI/ML model engine ingests role-based access control (RBAC) metadata from the hundreds of applications used in a modern enterprise. This creates an identity threat graph, highlighting the relationship between individual identities and what data those identities can access. With this visibility, Veza is also able to enforce the principle of least privilege by reducing a user’s access to only the data that is necessary to perform their job. Users are typically linked to over 30 digital identities, making it critical to have a system in place that can detect unauthorised access.
Tarun Thakur, CEO of Veza, calls this phenomenon the “identity iceberg” and believes this is the main challenge organizations face: realising which identities can access which kinds of data and what sort of actions can these identities take? He claims that this approach of identity-data mapping is much more effective than using traditional identity management tools such as Sailpoint and Okta, as these only aim to harden the identity perimeter against external attacks, not internal ones.
Michael Kelley, senior director analyst at Gartner, agrees, pointing out that beyond the principle of least privilege, organizations must also implement privileged access management (PAM) to further reduce the risk of insider threats. He suggests the use of PAM solutions to lock valuable privileged accounts into a single vault, where security teams can monitor the user activity and quickly take action should a malicious activity be detected.
Veza is helping organizations mitigate risk related to malicious insider threats and data leakage by providing greater visibility into data access. Join top executives in San Francisco on July 11-12 to hear more about how companies are integrating and optimizing AI investments to become more secure.
