Every time you tap to pay, send a crucial email, or rely on online services for your business, you’re interacting with a complex, often unseen, web of digital identities. But as our local economy rapidly digitizes, are these connections truly secure?
No longer just about human employees or customers, a company’s “identity” now includes every piece of software, bot, and automated system accessing its networks. According to SailPoint’s Asean managing director Eric Kong, in a recent media briefing, 69 percent of companies now have more machine identities than human identities, with nearly half of these organizations housing ten times more machine identities than people!
Imagine a bustling office where half the staff are digital robots, operating ceaselessly. The problem arises when no one truly knows who owns them, what their purpose is, or even their exact count or location, leading to significant security gaps and inefficient operations. Such unchecked machine identities can be exploited by cybercriminals, potentially leading to widespread data breaches, compromised personal information for customers and severe disruptions to essential services. For the average Filipino, this could mean frozen bank accounts due to fraud, crucial online services becoming unavailable, or even their private data appearing on the dark web.
This is where “identity security” steps in. As Kong explained, it’s about gaining comprehensive visibility into, understanding, and controlling every single digital access point within a company.
Powered by SailPoint Atlas, its AI can discover identities, provide intelligent recommendations, assist users, and automate complex tasks. To tackle the challenge of non-human accounts, SailPoint offers specialized “Machine Identity Security,” designed to govern the full lifecycle of these machine identities, ensuring visibility, compliance and security through seamless integration with human workflows. They’ve also introduced “Harbor Pilot,” a new set of AI-powered “digital agents” specifically crafted to provide identity teams with comprehensive insights and contextual support, including quick access to documentation and streamlined workflow generation through natural language prompts.
Aboitiz Equity Ventures - mastering
identity security
While many companies across the globe remain in the early stages of mastering identity security, often grappling with fragmented, manual processes where more than 40 percent of organizations remain in Horizon 1, SailPoint’s latest “Horizons of Identity Security” report pointed out: strategic investment in identity security, particularly a journey towards higher maturity, yields disproportionately higher returns.
A compelling example of this “leapfrog” phenomenon is Aboitiz Equity Ventures, a prominent local global technology group. It undertook a “Great Transformation” initiative, successfully “leapfrogging” from having zero formal identity and access management processes to a unified, automated program in just over 24 months of sustained effort. They reduced the time to activate or deactivate user accounts from days (21 days for deactivation, five days for activation) to instantaneous provisioning and deprovisioning.
They expanded centralized identity governance from less than 5 business units to an impressive 47 business units managing about 23,000 application accounts, scaling automated account modifications from less than 1,000 to 144,000.
Beyond Security
The advantages of advanced identity security extend far beyond merely preventing cyberattacks for businesses. Strong identity security can help lower what they pay for cyber insurance premiums, as identity capabilities are now considered the most critical factor by insurers.
While challenges like constrained budgets (cited by 90 percent of companies) and insufficient executive support (77 percent of companies) are indeed significant barriers at the start of the identity journey for many organizations, Kong underscored a critical point: the “costs of inaction can be far higher” than the strategic investment in identity security. Data breaches erode customer trust, lead to massive financial losses and can stall crucial business growth and innovation.