Page 46 - Cyber Defense eMagazine Annual RSA Edition for 2024

main technology for managing identities, cloud solutions like Microsoft Azure are increasingly gaining
traction, especially in managing identities within a complex landscape. This landscape encompasses
everything from user authentication to global resources (beyond the organization's internal network),
application authentication, and even external 3rd party access from vendors.

As the identity landscape continues to evolve and grow more complex, attackers continue to evolve their
identity targeting methods. This is not surprising, as once an attacker controls a privileged identity/ies,
they have almost unlimited access to an organizations’ resources. Due to the complex nature of
managing identities, these are far easier to compromise than, let’s say, developing a zero-day exploit,
which have limited shelf-life and reach.

In response, security vendors and directory vendors offer some solutions to help organizations better
protect their identities. These include the use of MFA in cloud environments, introduction of PAM security
solutions, Identity and Access Management solutions, credential vaults and more.

The Achilles Heel of Identity Management: Complexity

While these solutions do offer some improvements in security, they disregard the reality of identity
security in organizations – identity access infrastructure and practices have been evolving for
(sometimes) decades, creating an impossible knot to untie. Doing identity access the “right way” is hard,
very hard. If you are an IT admin, going “by the book” using Microsoft's guide for privileged access model,
you will need a very professional and dedicated team of experts that can build the entire network and
identity plane from scratch, making sure tier0 (the control plane) doesn’t overlap with tier1 (the data
plane), which doesn’t overlap with tier2 (users and applications plane):

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/security/privileged-access-workstations/media/privileged-access-
strategy/legacy-tier-model-comparison-new.png

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