IDSA finds ‘almost a fifth’ of businesses see managing digital identity as a top security priority

The Identity Security Alliance (IDSA), a non-profit group of identity and security vendors, solution providers, and practitioners, has found that almost a fifth of businesses – 17% – see managing digital identity as a top priority in their security program.

The findings came as part of ‘2023 Trends in Securing Digital Identities’, an annual whitepaper on identity security released by the organization.

More than two-fifths of respondents (44%) said they now see it as a top three priority, and another quarter had securing digital identity as a top five priority.

Only 4% of businesses don’t have securing identities as one of their top 10 priorities, according to the findings.

The report also identified the key challenges among its respondents in maintaining identity security.

The top two reasons were identity frameworks being complicated by multiple vendors and different architectures, cited by 40%, followed by complex technology environments, which were cited by 39%.

The respondents also identified insufficient budget (30%), a lack of expertise (29%), standards  (26%), people (25%), and governance (23%) as issues when it came to identity security.

The research also called on respondents to try and identify security outcomes that they feel could have prevented these identity security incidents, 96% of these felt that security measures could have lessened the business impact of the incidents.

The most popular security measure among respondents was multi-factor authentication (MFA), cited by 42% of respondents.

This was followed by timely reviews of access to sensitive data and privileged access, cited by 40% and 34% respectively.

The research also found that identity stakeholders identified the use of authentication and discovering user access rights and behavior as critical to addressing identity threats.

Many of the identity professionals surveyed show faith in the idea of passwordless identification, with roughly 79% calling it a great or solid technology.

Phishing-resistant MFA also proved popular with those surveyed, with 83% saying it was  a “great or solid technology” for the future.

Meanwhile, social media emerged as a key worry for many, 90% expressed concerns about employees using details from corporate logins for social media accounts.

The survey compiled answers from 529 individuals based in the US with a knowledge of IT security, drawing from firms with over 1,000 employees.

“As cloud adoption, remote work, mobile device usage, and third-party relationships drive up the number of identities, more and more organizations are suffering from identity-related incidents,” said Jeff Reich, Executive Director, IDSA. “Protecting digital identities has never been more important in the fight against increasingly savvy cyberattacks. And while managing and securing identities continues to be called out as a top priority by organizations, meaningful shifts in proactive investment and leadership are necessary to reduce risk.”

Article Topics

biometric authentication  |  cybersecurity  |  digital identity  |  identity access management (IAM)  |  IDSA  |  market report  |  passwordless authentication