You finally hang up the phone with a tired groan. That was the fifth time this month that a patient’s data didn’t come up when requested. As a CISO for a major hospital, you already get enough trouble from your sluggish management platform. If there’s another incident like last week, where a nurse couldn’t pull up a coding patient’s chart, you’ll probably be looking for another job. If only you could articulate to the higher-ups the root of the problem: you need a new identity vendor. Perhaps your organization has already sunk time and money into making the current solution work. Maybe you’ve attempted to integrate the solution into your application environment and spent hundreds of hours training your IT staff and end users. But no matter how much you try to accommodate, your identity vendor refuses to do the same.

Miss Mary Malkovich is having a bad day. Her dog, Blevins, has chewed up her checkbook and she needs a replacement. She tries to access her bank account online, but a forgotten password leads to a drawn-out verification process. Mary finally gets in but notices that her address is incorrect. A lack of a self-service option forces her to call up a representative. Then Blevins chews through the cord of her computer. She drives 20 miles to her nearest bank branch to get her issue resolved. There, she learns that her account has been targeted for fraud. She goes back home to get her birth certificate and passport to verify her identity.

Blevins has chewed them both up.

Manufacturing recalls ideas of big tough machines doing big tough machine things. Smelters turning molten iron into mighty girders. Robotic arms assembling sedans and minivans in a matter of minutes. Plastic injectors churning out tacky pieces of garbage that you don’t need or even want but you lack the self-control to resist a 40% off sticker. Yet despite its image of power and unstoppable industry, manufacturing is afflicted by a lack of PAM security. Manufacturing enterprises have suffered some of the worst cyberattacks in recent years. Ransomware struck 56% of manufacturing companies surveyed by Sophos between January and March 2023. In 2023 alone, more than a third of manufacturing ransomware victims paid ransom demands to get their data back.

A common piece of advice from the Simeio team to major enterprises is the importance of maintaining proactive regulatory readiness. As one of the largest markets in the world, the activities of the European Union (EU) are of global importance. The EU has lacked a standardized set of meaningful cybersecurity requirements. At present, a universal set of identity security requirements across all industries has yet to materialize. However the implementation of the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), in the EU, seeks to start making headway in the financial sector.

Cybersecurity is critical for hedge funds due to the high value of the sensitive information they handle. As a result, there is potential for significant financial loss and reputational damage from cyberattacks targeting hedge funds. Hedge funds have faced a significant rise in cybersecurity breaches. The complexity of vulnerabilities within hedge funds largely drives these attacks. In 2023, 77% of hedge funds reported a surge in the frequency of cyberattacks. Additionally, 87% indicated that the attacks were more severe than in previous years. Enterprises owe it to themselves and their stakeholders to operate secure hedge funds.

The adoption of computers for most business processes has resulted in cybersecurity being an important program of many organizations. Within cybersecurity, the IAM program is an integral part that straddles the line between the cybersecurity and information technology (IT) services of the organization. All organizations need to limit access to their data and resources which is enabled using some form of an IAM program. While one may see this as the cost of doing business, the IAM program has the potential to bring efficiency to an organization while enhancing security and reducing costs.

A car is taken to the auto shop for one of two reasons. Either to prevent an issue or to fix an issue. The bill is always higher to correct a smashed hood than it would have been to check the brakes. In the same way, proactive cybersecurity is preferred to picking up the pieces of a data breach. Would you rather invest in a robust cybersecurity strategy and platform now or pay $4.5 million plus the loss to reputation later? IAM (identity and access management) maturity requires an enterprise to adopt proactive measures to identify, assess, and mitigate the security risks associated with identity and access management.

Your users are the weakest link for exploitation by cybercriminals to gain access to your most valuable asset: your protected data. If you wish for your users to engage in best practices for identity-awareness, explain the following to them. First, what they know as “their account” is part of a larger snapshot of their digital profile. Second, this snapshot consists of their personal details, private access keys, and the privileges those two factors grant them within your system. Finally, point out that this identity does not belong in the hands of people seeking to exploit them.

Without a solid action plan, the implementation of meaningful changes to an enterprise’s identity fabric can seem an insurmountable challenge. Yet before improvements can be made, the current state of your identity program must be clearly defined. An IAM maturity benchmark can reveal uncomfortable truths about your enterprise’s risk posture. An immature IAM program exposes you to cyberthreats, compliance risk, loss of productivity, and/or wasted resources. Consider some of the troubling developments which CISOs must grapple with in 2024.