Have You Identified Where Your Next Breach is Coming From?

Identity growth is expanding rapidly—humans and machines together are pushing the limits of existing identity management solutions and infrastructure. With no end in sight and with identities becoming an evolving threat vector, organizations need to take stock of how existing systems can be streamlined, limit risk exposure, and improve operations.

Read on to learn how Radiant Logic can help improve your risk posture, streamline identity operations, and make your finance team happy too—with results vetted by Forrester Consulting’s Total Economic Impact of Radiant Logic.

Where Did All These Identities Come From? 

The move to mobile devices, the drive to digitally transform all aspects of business, and the connection of everything from cars to toasters have dramatically increased the number of human and machine identities. This growth has increased organizational awareness of the need to secure these identities to allow legitimate users to access network resources securely and successfully. Unfortunately, bad actors have also tracked this growth and are using identity access as a threat vector.

As a result of the increase in human and machine identities, organizations have been challenged to keep these identities secure. As noted in the 2022 Trends in Securing Digital Identities, the source of 98% of these new identities are being driven by cloud adoption, third-party relationships, and machine identities.

As the number and complexity of identities organizations are required to manage and secure increases, so does the risk of identity-related breaches. Every improperly managed or secured identity increases the magnitude of the attack surface, enabling breaches across multiple fronts.

The High Cost of an Identity-Related Breach

The study also disclosed that shockingly 84% of businesses surveyed reported they suffered an identity-related breach in the past year. Identity-related security breaches are incredibly damaging to the business and employees or customers. Breaches wreak havoc and incur costs in a number of ways:

• Company reputations are ruined
• Breaches are the source of follow-on identity theft or other malicious activities
• Public companies that experience a breach tend to see a –3.5% drop in stock value
• Additionally, the annual Ponemon/IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2022 calculated the cost of an average breach at $4.35 million

Trusted Identity Data is Critical to Enabling Secure Access Control

Today’s complex identity environments span legacy identity data and cloud sources and hybrid mixes of both. And the only way to ensure identity-consuming applications can effectively manage access and governance tasks, is to ensure they are provided with precise, timely identity data. Better known as trusted identity data, it’s crucial to enabling an organization to enforce necessary secure access control.

Unfortunately, the data attributes required to deliver trusted identity data must be dynamically assembled across complex identity stores. Get one attribute wrong out of hundreds or thousands, like a termination date, and you open your organization up to a breach. Compounding the problem are legacy data stores that are no longer supported, causing them to be insecure and unable to keep up with regulatory requirements.

What’s an Identity Data Fabric and how does it reduce breaches?

A proven way to reduce the risk of identity-related security breaches is to create an abstraction layer known as an Identity Data Fabric. Radiant Logic delivers a proven integration solution to connect disparate data sources across legacy, on-premises, and cloud infrastructures to provide real-time data simultaneously in the exact format, structure, and schema each consuming application requires.

Radiant Logic offers organizations a unified and continually updated source of identity data integration, management, use, and protection across applications and the entire IAM architecture.

Proving RadiantOne’s Impact on Security and Risk

Radiant Logic’s Identity Data Fabric delivers proven capabilities for a range of industries to help minimize their exposure to identity-related breaches. As detailed in a Forrester Total Economic Impact study, Radiant Logic enabled organizations to reduce data security breaches by 25%, saving millions of dollars in operational costs from breach-related expenses. Additional savings, not considered in these numbers, are costs related to brand and reputational damage or governmental fines.

A director of IAM interviewed for the survey told Forrester:

“The more identities our organization has to manage, store, and keep track of, the higher the risk of a data security breach. Radiant Logic has reduced this risk by allowing us to build out views and profiles and more effectively manage and monitor identities and their corresponding access to applications. Radiant Logic has allowed us to better control access, control accounts, and control the firewall rules that need to be open. Radiant Logic has enhanced our cybersecurity posture.”

How Technical Debt Hurts Security

Another critical factor in ensuring identity security is reducing technical debt, comprised of legacy infrastructure, maintenance of legacy systems, and cloud IAM service costs. Implementing Radiant Logic improves an organization’s security posture and dramatically reduces the costs associated with implementing Radiant Logic by over $9 Million for the study’s composite organization.

As another interviewee, a director of customer identity management, shared:

“With Radiant Logic, we have been able to take all of our applications along with their own corresponding security databases and consolidate them into one. We have moved all legacy applications and disparate security databases to one highly secure identity provider.”

Securing the Business and Saving the Budget

The most exciting takeaway from the Forrester study was the overall economics of how organizations can improve their security posture and provide an amazing return on investment. This blog focuses on how Radiant Logic can secure organizations while showing an economic justification to support its use. But, the study didn’t stop there; it provided cost benefits applicable across the entire identity infrastructure, saving a total of $20 Million for the composite organization. To find out more ways your organization can streamline identity operations, check out the Total Economic Impact of Radiant Logic in full, skim the TEI highlights in our e-book, or contact us for more information.