By Shai Mendel – Co-Founder & CTO
As businesses embrace digital transformation, identity management has emerged as a make-or-break priority. With each new cloud app, tool, and connected device, the complexity of managing identities, permissions, and access rights grows exponentially. The stakes are high: poor identity management can expose your organization to data breaches, insider threats, and compliance violations—all of which can cripple your reputation and bottom line.
But here’s the silver lining: future-proofing your identity strategy isn’t just a pipe dream—it’s something you can start today. By simplifying and optimizing how you manage identities across your organization, you set the foundation for a robust, scalable, and secure environment.
The truth is, shift happens—and the pace of change in identity management is only accelerating. To stay ahead of evolving threats, your organization must make proactive and strategic adjustments to your identity management program. In this post, we’ll dive into the key areas to focus on: assessing your coverage, optimizing visibility, and ensuring your tools are future-ready.
1. Assess Your Current Coverage: Is Your Identity Management Comprehensive Enough?
The first step in future-proofing your identity posture is assessing the coverage of your current identity management program. Many organizations still struggle with shadow IT, rogue applications, and fragmented access management across their environments. This often leads to inconsistent policies and unmanaged exposures, leaving critical assets vulnerable to threats.
What to do:
- Inventory all identities across your ecosystem: Ensure you have visibility over cloud services, on-prem systems, and third-party vendors.
- Close coverage gaps: Evaluate where you have insufficient visibility, whether in legacy systems or newer tools, and ensure your policies are consistent.
- Analyze privilege: Over-privileged accounts are prime targets for exploitation—ensure that roles and permissions are aligned with job needs.
How Nagomi can help:
- Surface Coverage Gaps: Nagomi automatically scans for gaps in your identity coverage by identifying gaps in tool effectiveness. Imagine automatically finding identity coverage gaps between your IAM, PAM, CMDB, Email Security, Security Awareness Training etc. This helps you ensure consistent visibility across all systems, eliminating shadow IT and unmanaged exposures.
- Surface Stale Identities: Nagomi flags stale or inactive identities—accounts that haven’t been used for months or are disabled—exposing weak security. By identifying these vulnerabilities, Nagomi reduces the risk of exploitation from attackers targeting neglected accounts.
- Comprehensive Coverage & Posture Management: Nagomi ensures full visibility into your controls across all identities. It detects deep control assessments based on your entire tool stack, and provides the insights needed to tighten access controls and prevent insider threats, phishing, and more.
2. Protect Critical Assets: Prioritize Access to Your Most Valuable Resources
Every organization has critical assets—whether they’re proprietary data, intellectual property, or infrastructure—that must be rigorously protected. But often, businesses fail to adequately prioritize access to these resources, leaving them exposed to threats from both insiders and external actors.
What to do:
- Identify and classify critical assets within your organization. These could include databases, customer records, financial systems, intellectual property, or access to high-value systems.
- Implement role-based access control (RBAC) and ensure that only users with a legitimate need to access these assets are granted permissions.
- Use strong multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all access to sensitive resources. While MFA isn’t a silver bullet, it adds an additional layer of security that’s effective at stopping unauthorized access attempts.
How Nagomi can help:
- Enhance Your Identity Posture Management: Nagomi integrates with your IAM, PAM, Security Awareness Training, Email Security and more in order to provide complete visibility into your identity posture. From there, you’re able to evaluate your program effectiveness by cross-referencing visible gaps against your custom threat profile.
- Identify Risky Identities & Provide Remediation Guidance: Nagomi helps prioritize the riskiest identities based on weak security posture, such as excessive privileges or inactive accounts, and offers actionable remediation guidance to strengthen these identities and minimize potential vulnerabilities.
3. Review and Continuously Adjust Identity Configurations & Controls
To manage identities effectively and minimize risk, it’s essential to proactively identify and address identity-related misconfigurations and ensure permissions remain aligned with the principle of least privilege.
What to do:
- Review identity-related configurations: Regularly evaluate your IAM settings to ensure they align with security best practices and address any potential misconfigurations.
- Cross-correlate misconfigurations: Identify misconfigurations that span across multiple tools, ensuring a single identity is consistently and securely managed across systems.
- Continuously assess the threat landscape: Regularly analyze evolving threats and prioritize remediation based on your organization’s unique risk profile to focus efforts where they will have the greatest impact.
How Nagomi can help: Nagomi automates the review and correlation of identity configurations across all systems, identifying misalignments and vulnerabilities in real-time. The platform continuously monitors the threat landscape, automatically flagging exposures and offering remediation guidance to adjust permissions and eliminate exposures. By enabling dynamic adjustments and prioritizing security actions based on real-time data, Nagomi ensures your identity management is both proactive and resilient.
4. Evaluate Your Identity Program’s Efficacy and Efficiency
As organizations grow and security threats evolve, it’s critical to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of your identity management program. This ensures your tools, like IAM, PAM, and Email Protection, are being fully utilized and delivering optimal protection.
What to do:
- Evaluate efficacy: Assess how well your current stack (IAM, PAM, Email Protection, etc.) is leveraging all the functionalities you’ve purchased. Are you fully utilizing these tools across your environment to manage and protect identities effectively?
- Evaluate efficiency: Cross-reference your identity program’s coverage against the latest threat intelligence. How well are your tools helping to mitigate the most up-to-date risks, and where are you exposed?
- Prioritize actions: Combine a holistic, cross-tool view of your identity management program with real-time threat intelligence to prioritize what actions will have the most impact today.
How Nagomi can help: Nagomi continuously evaluates and enhances your identity management program by assessing tool effectiveness and cross-tool integrations. It combines real-time threat intelligence with a holistic view of your identity landscape, identifying gaps and prioritizing remediation efforts. This ensures your identity management is both efficient and aligned with the latest threats, driving immediate improvements to your security posture.
5. Bridge Visibility and Communication Gaps Across Teams
Effective identity management doesn’t just require more tools; it requires clear, cross-functional communication. This is where many organizations fall short—security, IT, and business leaders often operate in silos, each with a different view of access controls, risks, and priorities. To truly future-proof your identity posture, you need visibility and alignment across teams.
What to do:
- Ensure that your security, IT, and business leaders are all aligned on the identity priorities for the organization. Everyone should understand their role in ensuring identity security and access compliance.
- Implement centralized dashboards that provide real-time visibility into user access, permissions, and activity across your entire ecosystem.
- Create cross-functional teams that meet regularly to review the effectiveness of your identity policies, tools, and processes, and ensure that any gaps in coverage or communication are addressed promptly.
How Nagomi can help:
- Unified, Cross-Functional Alignment: Nagomi fosters alignment between security, IT, and business leaders by providing clear, actionable insights into the identity program effectiveness and identity posture. Our platform ensures that everyone—regardless of department—understands their role in maintaining identity security and compliance, creating a unified approach to risk management.
- Centralized Real-Time Dashboards: With Nagomi’s centralized dashboards, you get real-time visibility into your tool deployment, identity posture, and tool effectiveness across your entire ecosystem. This consolidated view helps bridge communication gaps, enabling all teams to stay informed and aligned on identity management efforts.
The Bottom Line: Proactive Identity Posture Management Is Key to Future Security
In cybersecurity, shift happens—and it’s happening fast. But by proactively streamlining your identity management program and shifting to a CTEM (Continuous Threat Exposure Management) approach, you can mitigate risks, drive better decisions, and ensure that your business stays resilient in the face of evolving threats.
By evaluating coverage, protecting critical assets, managing permissions, optimizing tools, and fostering collaboration, you can build an identity management strategy that not only meets today’s needs but is also future-proof for tomorrow’s challenges.
The future of security is about more than just defense; it’s about integration, alignment, and continuous evolution.
Interested in getting started today? Request a demo.
