The Cloud Native era has disrupted how data infrastructures of all kinds are provisioned, managed and secured. Digital transformation and ‘work from anywhere’ trends have massively amplified the number of access points to critical information. This pits developers against security teams with opposing objectives. Developers rule the new world while security teams drown in silos of legacy tools which are ill-suited to manage cloud data risks. In this brave new world, developers outnumber security engineers 100:1. This vastly expanded digital surface area, combined with poor security practices and complex cloud architectures, is being exploited mercilessly by attackers to exfiltrate data.
As the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency posits, the most effective defense against data breaches and ransomware is prevention. And the bedrock of prevention is access control. A groundbreaking startup out of Silicon Valley, Stack Identity, puts access control front and center. Stack Identity recognizes that securing data, sharing data and managing data risks are all part and parcel of the same challenge – developing a closed loop process that implements consistent access control, continually scans for access control weaknesses and risks, and implements effective prevention.
The proliferation of data in clouds has introduced immense challenges to access control driven by new threat actors, exponentially larger digital surface area and lack of change management in a highly dynamic environment. Stacks of highly interconnected identities and applications dot the cloud landscape – be it a user, a machine, a service or application – exploding access to information assets. The modern cloud is, thus, littered with access, permissions and security policies that are sprawled across infrastructure, applications, and data assets. Access risks of all kinds are therefore invisible and unmanaged across infrastructure, application and data stacks. Invisible access has emerged as the biggest threat to Cyber security.
The process of operationalizing access needs to be reimagined for the Cloud Native era. Stack Identity is pioneering AccessOps, a new cloud-native security process, combined with new technologies and workflows that unify, consolidate, prioritize and remediate access risks across the entire cloud stack. With AccessOps you have the ability to establish access baselines, track and trace access, and remediate access risks quickly and efficiently. AccessOps implements solutions across five dimensions of access risk use cases: 1) Invisible Access, 2) Excessive / Over Privileged Access, 3) Unused / Orphaned Access, 4) Unsafe Access, and 5) Effective Access / Privilege Escalation. AccessOps introduces an early warning system that tracks access changes in real-time and auto-prioritizes imminent threats and breaches. It delivers ground truth evidence on the who, what, when, where, why, and how of these risk signals, and integrates with your existing workflow and orchestration tools to automate the remediation and prevention across the DevSecOps lifecycle.
When cybersecurity professionals are caught in a tsunami of cyber attacks, the last thing they need is to drown in more alerts. By equipping security teams with a self-aware prevention platform that continuously assesses risk in real time, AccessOps optimizes prevention for the Could Native era, and puts you back in the driver’s seat.
Stack Identity is currently in stealth mode. To learn more about AccessOps please email [email protected].
