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Cloud Security for IAM Professionals
Businesses are migrating to the cloud at the speed of innovation, and the public cloud is changing the face of the enterprise. With access permission now defined and inherited from many places, IAM practitioners are being tasked with implementing and maintaining least-privilege access in cloud environments – and finding it highly complex, to say the least.
Find out how Ermetic can help you reduce risk, save time and close knowledge gaps by governing user and service identities and their entitlements, and even managing cloud security posture in your multicloud environment.
One of the most underestimated risks to cloud infrastructure — and the hardest to find and fix — is misconfigured identities. Permissions define your cloud’s attack surface – and your environment’s blast radius upon a breach. According to Gartner, through 2023, 99% of security failures will be the customer’s fault – with 75% of those failures due to inadequate management of identities, access and privileges.
Protecting your public cloud environment requires a holistic approach that includes IAM – one that allows you to:
Gain Multicloud Visibility: Get a deep, multi-dimensional, searchable view into all human and service identities, resources, entitlements and configurations in your multi cloud environment
Proactively Detect Excessive Permissions: Identify and alert against excessive permissions by continuously analyzing the gap between granted and used permissions. For example, right-size excessive permissions generated when Developers and DevOps spin up new identities and policies that may not necessarily align with internal procedures.
Monitor for Anomalous Activities: Leverage advanced analytics and granular visibility on access, entitlement and infrastructure configuration changes to shed immediate light on malicious activity taking place.
Automate Response: Respond faster to security incidents and block off attacks within seconds of detection.
Ermetic goes beyond permissions visibility to reveal IAM risk context that informs our busy devops team, facilitating their efforts in mitigating risk and minimizing disruption.
Guy Reiner, Co-founder and VP of R&D, Aidoc
The Path to Zero Trust Identity and Access Management
Achieving zero trust and least privilege starts with obtaining a full and accurate picture of all entitlements. By continuously discovering and analyzing the relationships of all entities and policies (including IAM, resource, permissions boundaries and ACLs) in your environment, you can proactively close the gap between desired enterprise policies and actual entitlements and put your organization ahead of the threat risk curve.
Such automated analysis of entitlements enables IAM professionals to identify, assess and right-size overly permissive identities such as of privileged third parties and users federated from external identity providers (e.g., Okta and Azure AD). Ermetic’s continuous analytics-based behavior monitoring of identities prevents entitlements abuse and unauthorized changes to infrastructure configurations by:
Ingesting single sign-on (SSO) data from multiple IdPs for an effective permissions visualization mapping to risk-prioritize effective permissions across multicloud environments.
Identifying and prioritizing at-risk identities and excessive permissions to reveal toxic combinations and hidden dangers at scale.
Visualizing the resources and services every identity can access, and how it can be granted or denied permissions.
Secure Your Public Cloud with Just-in-Time (JIT) Access
Your engineering teams occasionally need direct, highly privileged access to your sensitive cloud environments for specific activities, such as debugging or manual deployment of a service. Such all-encompassing entitlements can introduce significant risk if not revoked when no longer needed. Ermetic provides a Just-in-Time (JIT) self-service portal for facilitating and controlling access requests to your cloud environments, and that minimizes the risk of long-standing privileges.
Using Ermetic’s JIT capability you can:
Minimize your cloud attack surface by enforcing fine-grained least privilege policies and avoiding use of long-standing privileges
Save engineering teams time by enabling them to quickly submit a request, notify approvers and gain temporary access
Monitor user activity during elevated sessions and generate reports for all JIT access requests and authorizations
Security and privacy standards (e.g., CIS, SOC2, HIPAA) require an organization to have cloud security capabilities in place for governing access policy and enforcing least privilege. Such access controls allow for continuous auditing and automated reporting of how privileged cloud identities are being used. They enable IAM stakeholders to answer basic questions regarding “How many resources are exposed? How many entitlements are excessive? Or advanced questions, such as, “Which identity (human or service) has access to an S3 bucket?
Ermetic’s holistic approach includes access governance capabilities that help your organization address compliance by adhering to the strictest regulatory standards all while identifying unusual behavior that may indicate misuse or a breach.
Automate Incident Response to Finding the Signal In the Noise
Ermetic enables and simplifies in-depth investigation by monitoring and reporting on suspicious or unusual activity across AWS, Azure and GCP. By creating a behavioral baseline for every identity, including analyzing all log trails and access behavior, the platform detects and turns anomalous findings into contextualized, risk-prioritized alerts that your teams can immediately operate on.
Simplify Incident Response and Investigation: Capture, analyze and continuously monitor risk across access, entitlements and infrastructure configuration to alert and automate response on activity deviating from your unique baselines.
Uncover and Respond to Threats: Context-rich alerts, visualizations and out-of-the-box workflow integrations provide the information and tools – including ticketing and built-in wizards – to help you respond rapidly.
“Ermetic has allowed us to concentrate on our business rather than on concentrate just on the cloud security.”
Roman BorodyanskyV.P. Corporate Cloud Services, Tyler Technologies
“With Ermetic, Tyler’s been able to save hundreds to thousands of man hours in managing permission sets in AWS.”
David ChristensenSenior Information Security Executive
“This is one of the few platforms I’ve brought into the cloud that has had actionable efforts in under 30 days. From a return on investment perspective, it was one of the best decisions we made.”
Michael BishopDir. Architecture and Engineering, BarkBox
“The biggest benefit of working with Ermetic, it’s the discoverability component of Ermetic. It really lifts the veil on what is an opaque system.
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By Ermetic Team 