Emerging Trends and Expectations in the Access Management Space

Doing by learning and learning by doing—it is not just an adage, but also a time-tested approach that leads to innovation, agility, and experimentation. That’s the work culture we at ARCON have espoused over the years. As a result, whatever we build or innovate, we continue to push the boundaries by embracing a doing by learning and learning by doing culture to achieve the best results.

Participation at global conferences and events is surely one way to learn, observe, and understand new things, trends, and expectations.

Indeed, as the world is coming towards normalcy post-pandemic, event organizers are gradually shunning their virtual modes for physical modes. We have passed more than the halfway mark for the 2022 calendar year. And ARCON has traveled across the world to comprehend the expectations of global IT professionals.

Face-to-face meetings and discussions with the audience has helped us to learn about the latest Access Management use cases and expectations. 

A Glimpse of Some of the Major Global Summits attended by ARCON Thus Far in 2022

1. Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit, Maryland, US
2. Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit, London, UK
3. Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit, Sydney, Australia 
4. Blackhat Asia 2022, Singapore
5. European Identity & Cloud Conference 2022, Berlin
6. PhilSec Hybrid event, Manila
7. Vietnam Security Summit, Hanoi
8. Cyber Security & Threat Intelligence Summit, Kuala Lumpur
9. CYSEC 2022, Doha
10. GISEC 2022, Dubai 

The strategic business development team opined that business has taken a welcome turn after industry leaders started to come out of the cocoon of virtual meetings and resumed face-to-face business meetings. At events, the advantage is that the professional bonding between the participants and visitors strengthens. Moreover, new business prospects are brightened with hand-to-hand understanding of mechanisms and live demos of the product functionalities. It even clarifies and answers queries on the spot that arise in between the discussions.

Key Takeaways from Meetings and Discussions with Global IT Professionals 

Speaking about the trends, it is highly evident that IT security pros are still keeping pandemic experiences in mind while discussing and searching for scalable and integrable solutions to reinforce their Access Management use cases. 

Most organizations have started to embrace hybrid work environments in order to ensure flexibility for employees. Against this backdrop, IT security leaders are looking for a security framework that not only enhances the user experience but also mitigates the looming threats arising from a growing IT setup. Here are some of the most discussed IT security trends that we came across. 

Zero Trust Architecture: Zero Trust is now mainstream as user authorization and authentication at every layer of access is critical to protect digital identities, devices and business information. As perimeters are no longer confined to on-prem data centres, IT security leaders are looking to build micro-perimeters and micro-segmentation of digital identities to ensure that trusted entitlements are never compromised by using continuous and contextual authentication of end users.

Identity-centric Security: As hybrid work models have been widely accepted, organizations are facing the challenge of managing hundreds, or maybe thousands, of user identities in the enterprise network. As a result, there have been queries about how to control, monitor, and secure user identities (including privileged identities) seamlessly. Organizations are not just looking to manage the lifecycle of a high number of identities but also want to govern them and predict risks arising from suspicious users. What the security leaders are looking for is a robust platform designed to detect identity-related threats and respond in a timely manner.

Cloud Security: A growing number of  organizations have migrated their IT infrastructure to cloud platforms. Many have even opted for hybrid clouds. As an obvious result, there is a growing demand for a solution that would enforce granular-level controls over all cloud users to ensure there is no overprivileged cloud identity. The other urgent need for organizations hosting data in multiple cloud environments is a centralized cloud engine to elevate privileges, enforce rule and role-based access to cloud resources, and provide timely remediation of anomalies.

Password-less Access Approach: Organizations are looking for a password-less approach in the access management area. IT administrators look for a “low-friction” and “high-security” model so that an uninterrupted IT process is ensured. 

Adopting ITDR Frameworks: The industry leaders continuously try to stay updated so that they can offer the best of the best IT security infrastructure to their organizations. However, vulnerabilities are unpredictable. Hence, to stay unaffected by any unprecedented incident, organizations are now looking for robust ITDR (Information Technology Disaster Recovery) mechanisms.

Conclusion

Identity and data security is at the heart of the digitization process for global organizations, and IT security pros are looking to adopt adequate security measures to strengthen their compliance frameworks along with frictionless user experience.