Lessons from the Gartner Security Summit 2018

“Security starts with Identity.” – Justin Taylor, Gartner presenter

My key take away of last week’s Gartner Security Summit can be summarized in this simple quote. With large breaches (Equifax), data protection (GDPR), and data privacy (Cambridge Analytica) in the recent news, identity plays an important role in modern cybersecurity. Without an identity you have NO visibility to a device, person, or server that needs protection.

“It takes 20 years to build a brand, but it takes one person to ruin it.” – Quote heard from multiple speakers, analysts, and attendees

Several recent breaches are being talked about during the conferences that reflect the changes in new technology.

• Casino gets breached through its Internet connected fish tank thermometer. Read more
• Alexa records conversation and emails it to outside individual. Read more

Again identity plays an import role in how these new devices get managed in our cybersecurity stacks.

From speaker sessions, here are four innovations in identity that will affect cybersecurity:

1. Internet connected devices (IoT) like Alexa, thermometers, and others are appearing all over enterprises. These present a critical vulnerability for breaches. Enterprises need to build a strategy on how to govern, authenticate, and protect these devices as identities.
2. Artificial Intelligence will be showing up more and more in our security stacks. Not in replacing workers, but in optimizing workflows. For example machine learning can be used to automate provisioning of identities.
3. Cloud will be surpassing on-premise solutions by 2021. This metric shows that growth of the cloud with overtake on premise software. These cloud servers will also have to get treated like identities.
4. Blockchain is still very much hype, yet it is gaining a lot of increased attention in identity. But beware; GDPR and blockchain do not fit together, especially with the right to be forgotten.

Throughout these sessions I keep thinking - Legacy security stacks cannot integrate these innovations quickly and efficiently. With the changes in technology happening so fast and breaches happening even faster, CIO’s and CISO’s are going have to think about how innovation plays an important role in their organizations. They may have to think of it as an identity.

Adrian Mendoza is the Director of Product Management for Perseus IAM – Lighthouses Next-Gen Identity Access Management (IAM) product from Good Dog Labs. Perseus IAM is pre-integrated with IBM with a goal of modernizing IAM and better connecting it to the cybersecurity and governance infrastructure. Perseus IAM includes support for IoT, cloud, and blockchain using its IAM specific microservices. Visit perseusiam.com for a demo.