New Capability: Unused Access & Stale Data Detection

Description

:bangbang: SailPoint® is excited to announce new capabilities in Data Access Security, enabling organizations to seamlessly detect and remediate Unused Access and Stale Data.

Unused access and data, unnecessarily diminish organizations security posture, exposing them to risks and substantial material loss from ransom fees, reputation damage, loss of business, and compliance fines, all of which can result from data breaches, incidents, and audit findings.

With these new capabilities, organizations will be able to mitigate identity data exposure, by removing unnecessary access rights, safely enforcing a least-privilege access model, as well as reducing their overall attack surface, by discovering unused data, that can safely be archived or disposed without impacting business continuity.

As part of this release Data Access Security is delivering the following capabilities, to help organizations address the challenges stemming from unused access, and stale data, based on real usage statistics.

New Capabilities

  • Stale Access Detection: Data Access Security leverages data access activity information to track identities’ use of their access rights, whether these are directly assigned, or granted through Entitlements and access groups. Unused and stale access is reflected on the different identity access paths in different Data Access Security Permission views, using color-coded indicators to represent levels of staleness. This enables administrators and data owners to quickly identify and remediate unnecessary access.

  • Stale Data Visibility: Data Access Security leverages data access activity information to track what data is being used by the organization, as well as what data is not being used, and can be safely stored away, or removed. Data Access Security provides a heat map identifying unused stale data across the organization’s different data stored - highlighting areas with large concentration of unused data to be remediated.

  • Targeted Stale Access Queries: Data Access Security in-depth forensics views, provide granular insights into unused access, enabling users to query and filter stale access that has not been used for a period of time, whether it is days, months or years. Stale access is highlighted in the forensics view, enabling quick detection and actionability.

  • Custom Access Certification: Leverage the granular, in-depth insights to review and reject access that has not been used, or revalidate its necessity and certify access rights using Data Access Security Access Certification engine.

  • Scheduled Reporting: Generate and schedule periodic and ad-hoc reports on stale data and unused access, to stay abreast as access usage progress, keep key stakeholders informed with the most up-to-date status across the data assets within your organization.

Problem

Unused data and excessive permissions impose unnecessary risk to the organization, increasing its attack surface and weakening its security posture, making it more susceptible to privilege misuse and permission sprawl, that can be leveraged in data breaches and cyber-attacks when an identity is jeopardized.

Organizations need visibility into unused data and unnecessary access that can be safely revoked to reduce the attack surface and adopt a least-privilege access model—without disrupting business continuity. With the surge in data volume and the variety of applications and storage solutions used in today’s enterprises, both on-prem and in the cloud, tracking data and access usage across organizations has exceeded human capacity

Solution

Data Access Security continuously monitors identities’ access in real-time and tracks the usage of both access and data. With these real-time insights, it automatically detects and highlights unused access that can be safely removed to enforce least-privilege principles, as well as stale data that can be safely disposed of to reduce the attack surface. Together, these actions minimize the organization’s exposure and enhance its overall security posture—without compromising business continuity or efficiency.

  • Highlight unused access paths to sensitive data assets
  • Flag and report on stale effective access
  • Map out stale data across the organization with interactive Heat Maps
  • Report on the most and least active users and data assets with built-in reports

Identities’ Stale Access Tree View:

Highlight Stale Access in Permissions Forensics:

Stale Data Heat maps:

Stale Data Analysis:

Who is affected?

  • All existing Data Access Security customers across all regions.
  • All ISC customers looking to identify unused access to reduce over-provisioning, and identify stale data to reduce attack surface and storage costs.
  • File Access Manager customers looking to migrate to Identity Security Cloud.

Action Required

  • Enable Activity Monitoring for all governed applications to take advantage of the Stale Access and Stale Data Detection capabilities.

Important Dates

  • Limited Availability - December 17th, 2024
  • General Availability - January 6th, 2025