It’s not that often that a story about a Joiner-Mover-Leaver (JML) failure makes the international news. But throw in an insider threat actor making potentially life threatening changes to the impacted systems and it becomes quite the doozy. Especially when the company at the center of the story is Disney.

There’s no way around it: program management skills are a must for any IAM leaders, lest they wish to preside over a chaotic, disorganized mess. IAM initiatives often involve complex, interconnected systems and processes – and most of all, people. Without a firm grasp of program management, leaders risk delays, overruns and a final implementation that’s more like a Frankenstein’s monster than a well-running solution.

The adoption of cloud services and the shift to remote work have rapidly expanded the attack surface. In many ways, identities are arguably now at the frontier of cybersecurity – which means traditional identity and access management (IAM) approaches are increasingly inadequate. Cyberattacks are also growing in sophistication, in part through exploiting vulnerabilities in the traditional, fragmented IAM systems that many companies are still using.

The primary purpose of a network is to enable sharing of resources among a group of users. Whether those resources are computing devices, applications or file data, the goal is to provide access to exactly those who need it. However, achieving this goal can be challenging because modern organizations are highly dynamic. On any given day, new employees may be hired, others may take on more or different responsibilities, and some leave the company.

In today’s digital landscape, Privileged Access Management (PAM) has evolved beyond rotating and vaulting privileged credentials for long-lived systems. As organizations expand cloud investment and scale sustainable hybrid work, PAM has also grown into a multi-faceted discipline that must secure all identities across the enterprise.

With an average of more than 5 data breaches globally a day, it’s clear companies need a way to prevent data loss. This is where a data loss prevention policy comes into play. A data loss prevention policy serves as a crucial safeguard against unauthorized access, data breaches, and compliance violations. This comprehensive framework outlines strategies and procedures to identify, monitor, and protect valuable data assets across an organization’s network, endpoints, and cloud environments.

Active Directory (AD) is the most prolific identity platform in the world. Like many companies already using AD on-premises, you may now be considering extending your identity environment to the cloud to create a hybrid landscape. There are many reasons behind this: resource constraints, strategy evolution, merger, acquisition or otherwise.

Privileged Access Management (PAM) is a comprehensive methodology for managing and securing privileged accounts—those that possess elevated permissions to perform critical functions within an organisation’s IT infrastructure. These accounts enable access to sensitive data and systems, making them highly attractive to cybercriminals. The core objective of PAM is to ensure that only authorised personnel have access to these accounts, under strict monitoring and control.

We all know identity management and security are critical to hardening cybersecurity ecosystems. We also know that we can make it happen using the many features and functions across Active Directory (AD), Entra ID and Microsoft 365. The challenge is making sure these are deployed in a way that allows them to work seamlessly together, staying aligned even in environments where there’s fluidity and decentralization.

As businesses expand, their networks become increasingly complex, encompassing on-premises devices, remote workstations, cloud services, and IoT devices. This growth, coupled with rising cloud adoption, puts immense strain on the process of maintaining a stable and secure infrastructure. In today’s hyper-connected world, even a brief network outage or security breach can result in significant financial losses, operational downtime, and reputational damage.