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 afterauthentication-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 unifiedapproach 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.

Okta Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM)
What it is	A proactive, pre-authentication safeguard against Identity-based threats, like credential theft or misuse
What it does	Gathers and analyzes industry threat intelligence to provide security leadership with the most comprehensive picture possible of the organization's Identity posture
How it does it	Fast and easy integration: By seamlessly integrating with Identity providers and applications (both cloud and on-prem), ISPM can create a full snapshot of the organization's Identity attack surface. One unified view: The ISPM Dashboard synthesizes all Identity-related issues into risk categories. For example, MFA coverage, excessive privileges, Identity sprawl, and password hygiene. This level of organization expedites remediation and alerts security leaders to the company's most pressing issues. Granular detail made simple:ISPM's Identity and Access Graph feature translates information regarding individual users (e.g., their access and entitlement paths and Identity risks) into simplified graphical insights that leaders can use to gain absolute clarity.

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.

Before unifying Identity with Okta	After unifying Identity with Okta
Information silos caused by fragmented, poorly integrated point solutions obscure the full picture of your organization's Identity posture, leading to security gaps that bad actors can exploit.	A unified view of your organization's attack surface and Identity posture prevents misconfigurations that lead to serious vulnerabilities and allows security leaders to take immediate action on the most serious Identity-related threats facing the organization.
Limited data on Identity-related risk handicaps your organization's ability to understand and respond to risk in real time.	Contextualization capabilities link all user accounts to their required privileges, activities, and stages in the employee lifecycle to mitigate threats and ensure consistent compliance.
Fragmented access policy determinations make it difficult or impossible to consistently adhere to a least-privileged access standard, weakening your Identity posture and exposing your organization to unnecessary risk.	Centralized policy administration (powered by advanced automation and continuous risk monitoring) helps your organization maintain least-privileged access across your entire tech stack.

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

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