The inaugural ID Management Day was held last week, a global day of recognition for the importance of securing an individual's identity.

Identity ManagemtnDay is essentially a day of awareness founded by the Identity Defined Security Alliance (IDSA), aimed at educating and engaging business leaders and IT decision makers about the intersection of identity management and security. With the vast majority of attacks on business environments coming via way of breached credentials, and with. ore and more people working away from a structured office environment, the management of an employee's ID is more important than ever.

Julie Smith, executive director of the IDSA, says recent research by the IDSA revealed that 79 percent of organisations have experienced an identity-related security breach in the last two years, and 99 percent believe that those identity-related breaches were preventable.

Art Gilliland, CEO of Privileged Access Management vendors Centrify, concurs. He states that: “In the last year, 90 Percent of cyberattacks on cloud environments leveraged compromised privileged credentials. This alarming finding illustrates how cyber-attackers are easily accessing critical systems and sensitive data through improperly managed credentials -- and leveraging identity sprawl across a threatscape expanded by digital transformation.

The reality is that these adversaries no longer ‘hack’ in – they log in, using stolen identities and weak or default credentials.

Identity Management Day not only reinforces the need for good cyber-hygiene but also to use technology solutions available to vault, authenticate, manage, and secure privileged identities and access.

“Modern privileged access management (PAM) solutions based on Zero Trust principles can minimise shared accounts and allow human and machine identities to log in as themselves. These tools should automate privileged access controls, reduce administrative risk, and strengthen compliance postures to protect the keys to the kingdom,” concludes Gilliland.