The concept of AI might trigger both excitement and stress for those who spend all their time either using it for efficiency or fighting it as it tries to breach their systems. A massive force of non-human identities that have been summoned to expose the tiniest cracks in an organization’s security is enough to overwhelm any IT team.
However savvy, modern security professionals have begun to raise their own versions of AI armies – designed to stop those sent by malicious actors. And it’s no wonder.
Properly managed automations in an organization’s privileged access management (PAM) bolster security and mitigate risk at a rapid speed. But only when AI in PAM is matched with the human element that your IT team provides can it become such a highly effective part of a cybersecurity Identity Fabric.
Artificial vs. human intelligence
The worry that most organizations have when considering whether to integrate AI into a PAM strategy is that human insight will be removed. AI in PAM is only as good as the data it’s fed and the protocols it’s designed to enforce.
A human might know to lock down a certain type of login for which the AI does not account. A human can keep track, laboriously and tediously perhaps, of accounts that are no longer needed due to an employee’s change in role. But these types of human insights can be lost when a rapid-fire AI gets involved.
But if an AI meant to keep out intruders out is given leeway to make inferences and to make critical assumptions on our behalf, it can become dangerous. One configuration mistake can proliferate swiftly, undoing any benefit that the AI might have originally had.
This becomes particularly worrisome when considering the number of high-risk activities that AI is typically used for. Putting the safekeeping of privileged credentials in the hands of a poorly configured AI is even more likely to lead to breaches than the time-consuming, manual processes of its predecessors.
AI in the Identity Fabric
But AI in a PAM environment has another side to it – the sharp side of the double-edged sword – and this side is the one people look to when honing their identity security.
The most obvious benefit of incorporating AI in PAM is its speed. Manual processes and procedures that used to take security teams days can be reduced to minutes or seconds thanks to AI detecting the issues and determining the best and most secure way to address them.
AI integrated into PAM is more than just a run-of-the-mill “ChatGPT can write my essay for me” intelligence. This predictive coupling can enact security policies that protect improper credential use or authorization at record time, preventing breaches before they start. It can recognize unusual activity, such as a login from a thousand miles away from the user’s typical location, and can enact further authorization and authentication methods.
With the speed and accuracy of these predictive AI methods, PAM has never been more secure.
Conclusion
Integrating AI in PAM can pose both risk and reward.
The risk is in losing the human element – insights that a human might detect that an AI might not. When an AI is given a high-risk duty like protecting the organization’s most valuable accounts, one misconfigured policy might lead it to continuously leave a vulnerability exposed, causing a privileged account breach.
But the benefit of properly configured AI in PAM is both speed and accuracy in one’s defenses. It becomes a predictive defense machine, stopping breaches and heavily reducing human error and processing time.
This makes the real security champion a combination of both AI and human intervention when dealing with PAM. With both of these factors at play, as they are in One Identity Safeguard, an organization’s PAM strategy is primed to be a security powerhouse.
