Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM)

ISPM is a proactive solution to reduce enterprise risk regarding identity security.

The purpose of ISPM is to continuously assess, monitor, and improve an organization’s identity and access configurations to reduce security risks. It helps identify misconfigurations, excessive permissions, and policy violations across identity systems, ensuring least-privilege access and compliance with security standards.

To achieve this ISPM solutions use AI and machine learning to analyze various aspects of identity data, access and assets to identify any identity-related risks.

A good ISPM solution should cover the following functions:

Continuous discovery and inventorying. A robust ISPM solution should be able to identify all identities (human and non-human) and resources spread across your environment, whether on-premises or in the cloud. The more data available to analyze, the better results ISPM delivers.

Risk assessment and posture analysis. By analyzing permissions, policy and role configurations, and access patterns, ISPMs can detect identity-related risks such as overprivileged and dormant accounts, misconfigurations or policy drift, policy violations, and more. This information is provided though visual dashboards and reports.

Policy Enforcement and Recommendation. Based on key performance indicators (KPIs) or benchmarks, ISPMs provide prioritized remediation recommendations based on the riskiest access. They can also automatically trigger remediation actions by other systems to quickly remove risks such as unused access or misaligned policies.

Ongoing monitoring and alerts. ISPMs are not a point-in-time reporting tool but a solution that provides continuous monitoring for any changes in risk-related postures and alerting as new risks surface.

ISPMs deliver proactive identification and remediation of risks and troublesome posture. They dramatically shrink the threat landscape by limiting the amount of time bad actors have to exploit risks.

ISPMs are able to enforce least privileged access and Zero Trust violations to maintain compliance with relevant government and industry regulations. In this way, they help you avoid costly fines due to non-compliance and loss of brand value to bad publicity.

Effective ISPMs help reduce costs by eliminating the need for business intelligence systems to pull and analyze data. They also allow analysts to focus on proactive risk and threat identification and on writing complicated queries or APIs to identify risks.

Not all organizations need ISPM, but most can benefit from implementing such solutions, especially as identity is a primary attack vector. As organizations scale, the benefits of ISPM become more valuable, not only for security, but also for compliance, and productivity. 

Organizations are often missing a complete view of their risk postures and, even with strong IGA programs, are stuck in reactive security modes that identify risks after periods of time that greatly increase risk postures.

Those with complex IT environments or a heavy reliance on cloud infrastructures can especially find benefit. These organizations typically have a lot of users, service accounts, human and non-human identities, and third-party access. 

Yes! One of the core capabilities of an ISPM solution is its ability to ingest and correlate data from multiple identity security solutions such as IGA, privileged access management (PAM), application access governance, SIEMs, CASB, and other solutions. The more integration, the better insights ISPM solutions are able to provide.