Over the past decade, corporate cyber security has undergone a fundamental transformation. As businesses have embraced cloud-based services and remote work, the days of securing all users, devices, and data within tightly controlled on-premises environments are gone. What once existed behind secure perimeters is now exposed to the broader internet, creating new vulnerabilities for cyber threat actors to exploit.
This shift has reshaped corporate digital environments, with sensitive data now residing in the cloud via platforms such as Salesforce, Dropbox, and other productivity and SaaS tools. As a result, identity has become the cornerstone of cyber security. Where organisations could previously focus on protecting the network perimeter, they must now concentrate on securing identities—the new security perimeter.
The Growing Importance of Identity Security
According to the Identity Defined Security Alliance (IDSA) in its 2024 report Trends in Security Digital Identities, a staggering 90 per cent of organisations experienced at least one identity-related security incident in the past year. This percentage has remained consistent since 2023. However, the impact of these breaches is growing—84 per cent of organisations that suffered identity-related incidents in 2024 reported direct business impacts, up from 68 per cent the previous year.
The significance of these statistics is clear: identity security must be a core component of any cyber security strategy. Threat actors are continuously refining their tactics for greater impact should an attack prove successful and ignoring this threat not only jeopardises sensitive data but can also have profound consequences for an organisation’s bottom line.
Understanding Identity Security
To mitigate the risks surrounding identity-related threats, it’s crucial to first understand what identity security entails and how it has expanded in recent years.
At its core, identity refers to a dataset representing a person or entity, and identity security ensures that only known and authorised individuals and systems can access specific data. In a corporate context, identities can be split into two primary groups: human identities and machine identities.
Human Identity - Securing Users
Human identities are the most obvious examples of digital identities and typically include: employees (whether permanent or contracted), partners, vendors, or customers with limited access to corporate environments.
Securing human identities often involves verifying the legitimacy of the person, ensuring they have the appropriate permissions, and confirming that their actions can be trusted. And all on a continuous basis, with evolving controls that can adapt to changes in a user’s behaviour. This verification process relies heavily on technologies like multi-factor authentication (MFA) and identity governance solutions to maintain the integrity of these identities.
Machine Identity - Securing Non-Human Actors
While human identities are more straightforward, machine identities—those not tied to a human user—are just as critical. These identities are associated with applications and services running across environments, workloads and devices used within the organisation.
For example, consider an application that sends emails on behalf of a user. This application needs access to sensitive data stored in the user’s mailbox. Verifying the security, authenticity, and extent of this access is essential, and failing to do so can lead to serious vulnerabilities. Machine identities must be managed, monitored, and controlled just as rigorously as human ones to prevent misuse and unauthorised access to sensitive data.
The Complexity of Modern Identity Security
As organisations evolve, adopting new technologies, migrating to cloud services, and facilitating remote work, managing identities has become increasingly complex. This complexity grows with the rise of:
- Cloud services and their integration with on-premises systems.
- Remote work and the growing trend of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies.
- Digital transformations that introduce new platforms and access points.
A robust identity security strategy requires continuous oversight. It’s not enough to implement identity security tools and assume the job is done. As users, devices, and technologies develop and shift with changing business priorities, identity authentication and authorisation must adapt accordingly, ensuring no vulnerabilities emerge that could undermine security or productivity.
Building a Resilient Identity Security Strategy
This “identity shift” makes it imperative for organisations to treat identity security as a central pillar of their broader cyber security framework. Whether securing human or machine identities, continuous authentication, authorisation, and monitoring must be in place to protect against emerging threats.
To safeguard your organisation in this new era, focus on implementing a comprehensive identity security strategy that includes:
- Strong (ideally passwordless and phish-resistant) multi-factor authentication.
- Regular identity auditing and governance.
- Continuous monitoring of both human and machine identities.
As the cyber threat landscape continues to develop at pace, so must your approach to identity security. It’s time to adapt and build the infrastructure necessary to protect your organisation from the growing threats of identity-related breaches.
Threatscape’s complimentary Microsoft Entra ID Advisory Service helps you to understand the identity threats that our Microsoft experts see lodged against organisations every day, and the associated security protections available within your Microsoft 365 licence.
During your no-obligation consultation with one of our consultants, you’ll gain insight and recommendations on how Entra ID and other capabilities within Microsoft 365 help defend cloud identities against a wealth of threats.
