Opal Security Introduces Least Privilege Posture Management to Uplevel Identity Security

Digital identity management has long been a complicated undertaking. Teams have struggled to manage access across multiple systems and logins, keep up with authorization demand, and prevent unnecessary privilege escalations to maintain security. 

But, of course, the stakes are high. 

According to a Delinea survey, within the past 18 months, 84% of organizations have encountered a privileged access-related breach. Additionally, Gartner's research indicates that 75% of security incidents can be traced back to human error related to access privileges and identities. Over-provisioning can take down critical business systems and cost organizations significant time and resources in remediation and other fallout. 

Many have approached this problem by onboarding more identity management tools, including separate tools for different functions and deployments. While this may help somewhat, it also leads to unnecessary complexity and gaps that must be covered with manual workarounds. Moreover, as the stats above make clear, plenty of identity-based breaches slip through these defenses.

Until recently, there hasn’t been a better way to tackle this massive challenge. Today, we present a different approach to identity security altogether. 

It’s time to make identity management more efficient and effective with a single platform for managing privileged access across systems and data. Opal Security’s new Least Privilege Posture Management (LPPM) capability allows teams responsible for identity security to quickly identify and fix the most critical security issues and measure their identity security posture and progress over time.  

Opal is the first identity security platform to implement this. We believe governance-minded IT and compliance workflows simply don’t suit the needs of modern organizations grappling with identity management issues. Instead, Opal offers the ability to operationalize identity security in a model that is both more familiar to security teams and more effective at addressing identity-based risk.

‍

The Case for Applying Posture Management to Identity

In IT security, applying a realistic lens to risk management is common and a best practice. Since it is impossible to address every possible risk simultaneously, security teams must perform risk assessments and prioritize security issues. Then, teams can better manage and allocate resources toward the most high-impact fixes in a logical order. Ultimately, this means teams focus on the most salient issues in order. 

Additionally, this approach recognizes that security is never a one-time effort but rather a process of continuous improvement backed by regular monitoring for vulnerabilities, threats, and new risks to an organization’s overall posture. 

While this approach, sometimes called security posture management, has long been recognized as the best way forward, it has been difficult, if not impossible, to apply to identity and access management. 

Why has this been so difficult? 

• Access sprawl often results from either persistent authorization or incident-reactive authorization.
• Resource-strapped security teams need help to keep up with authorization demands, which sometimes means they allow more privileged access than is ideal.
• Disparate identity tools for different functions (IGA, PAM, CIEM), and deployments (cloud, SaaS, on-prem) add complexity and create gaps.
• Many security teams attempt to manage this with spreadsheets and manual effort.
• This manual effort can increase the potential for human error.
• Lack of prioritization or a means to prioritize has hampered teams’ ability to focus on the right privilege- or identity-related issues in the right order.

To reduce access sprawl, manage identity attack surfaces, and enforce secure by default policies, IT teams need to move beyond governance in favor of an approach to identity management that mirrors IT security’s risk-based posture management and embraces the key principle of least privilege access.

‍

Least Privilege Posture Management in Action with Opal Security

Opal’s recently released Least Privilege Posture Management (LPPM) capability builds upon the larger Opal Identity Security platform by integrating security workflows to better manage IT privilege access.

Opal’s new LPPM capabilities include: 

• A Risk View providing fast visibility into an organization’s current “least privilege posture,” as well as historical trends.
• Prioritized recommendations of potentially insecure access across the organization
• One-click remediations, enabling security teams to quickly and scalably fix issues from within the recommendations view without having to jump between app interfaces  

Risk-Based Dashboard

Opal’s LPPM capability provides centralized visibility into an organization’s identity security posture, with a single solution to manage authorization to critical systems and data. Our risk-based reporting structure identifies high-, medium--, and low-risk connections across the organization so security teams can focus on the most critical issues — and cut through alert fatigue. 

Simple visualizations within Opal allow security users to see the current state of the organization's identity security posture and progress over time, enabling continuous security program improvement.

Visualize the state of your least privilege program currently, as well as trends over time to manage your progress.

‍

Prioritized Recommendations 

One of the common challenges in any security program is knowing where to focus limited resources. Opal provides a prioritized list of issues by risk category so security teams can focus on fixing the issues that will reduce risk most significantly. (Note, we can also list the risk factors here instead of the above section to balance them out in terms of text per session.

Within Opal, risk is scored based on four factors to prioritize recommendations:

1. Access timeframes (e.g., time-bound vs. permanent)
2. Sensitivity of the accessed resource (e.g., Does this resource have access to PII?) 
3. Levels of resource usage among those who have access
4. Origin of access (i.e., Were proper protocols followed?)

Quickly see the most important issues to resolve based on multiple risk factors.  Click to resolve, or assign to someone if more context is required.

‍

One-Click Remediation

Of course, knowing what to fix is only half the battle. If remediation requires creating tickets for each issue and logging into different systems to change or revoke access, it will be time-consuming and limit the number of issues that can be fixed in a given timeframe. 

Opal’s LPPM capability supports one-click remediations, where direct action can be taken directly from the list of recommendations. Opal’s unique write-access capability can directly update the permissions in the relevant system. If more context is needed, security teams can assign a recommended fix to another team member—for example, the user’s manager or the system's business owner. There’s no need to jump around multiple tools and change configurations on an app-by-app basis—everything happens seamlessly in one platform.  

Fast, automated remediation significantly reduces the security team’s manual workload and improves team collaboration and delegation.

Quickly resolve issues directly from Opal’s platform by revoking access or changing to Just-In-Time (JIT).  Opal leverages write access to each resource, enabling teams to modify access centrally and scalably.

‍

Redefining Identity Security for Modern Enterprises

Opal provides a single solution to prevent, detect, prioritize and fix privileged access issues across tools and deployments, simplifying identity security posture management in a way that has never before been possible. Moreover, Opal enables continuous improvement in an organization’s identity security posture, ensuring risk decreases over time. Perhaps best of all, Opal’s platform operates on a model familiar to security teams, finally bringing a realistic risk prioritization sensibility to the world of identity management.

Click to request a demo of Opal’s Least Privilege Posture Management capability in action.