Unmanaged Permissions are Expanding Your Attack Surface

The adoption of multicloud has brought great benefits to organizations – but inadvertently created a new attack surface that did not exist 5 years ago.  In fact, over 40K permissions exist across the key cloud platforms, and nearly 50% are estimated to be high-risk and could cause catastrophic damage if used improperly, such as, service disruption, service degradation or data exfiltration. To make matters worse, we’ve discovered that more than

90% of identities (both human and workload) use less than 5% of the permissions they are granted to perform their daily tasks

– leaving the other 95% of unused permissions wide-open to accidental misuse or intentional exploitation of permissions.


Manage permissions based on historical usage and activities

By working towards a Zero Trust security model, organizations can reduce their permissions gap and secure their environment. The problem is, implementing least privilege access policies is almost impossible to do manually at cloud scale. 

To efficiently reduce permission risks, organizations need to shift from static processes that grant permissions based on job roles and assumptions, to a dynamic solution that can right-size permissions based on historical data.  

Entra Permissions Management provides a single unified platform to manage permissions of all identities across all major cloud platforms. With granular cross-cloud visibility and a look into your identities’ historical data, you can easily assess your cloud permissions risks and right-size permissions with just a few clicks. And, thanks to the automation of the principle of least privilege and high-precision ML-based anomaly detection capabilities, Entra Permissions Management helps streamline your threat detection, embrace a Zero Trust strategy, and maintain a strong security posture. 

Permission Creep Index (PCI) Dashboard

Discover & Assess 

Get a multi-dimensional view of your permission risk.

Understand your risk profile with the Permission Creep Index, a single metric that evaluates the gap between permissions granted and permissions used. Get detailed usage analytics and uncover every action performed by any identity on any resource. 

Create Role Dashboard

Remediate & Manage

Automate the principle of least privilege.

Remove unused and excessive permissions by creating new policies/roles in a few clicks and use least privilege derived templates to enforce Just-In-Time access. Grant identities permissions on-demand for a time-limited period or an as-needed basis.  

Create Alert Dashboard

Monitor & Alert

Streamline anomaly detection and accelerate incident response.

Track permissions usage patterns and with customizable alerts. Strengthen your security posture with high-precision machine learning-based anomaly detections. Generate detailed reports and cyber kill chain analysis to speed up threat investigation and remediation.  

Managing permissions across multicloud environments requires a new approach.

By ensuring identities only have access to permissions and resources they need to perform their day-to-day job functions, organizations can enhance their security posture and protect their critical data from potential breach. 

When identities need permissions for a limited amount of time, these should be assigned temporarily on an as-needed basis, and automatically revoked at the end of the specified period.  

And lastly, closing the permissions gap is not a one-time action, automated processes must be implemented to continuously monitor activity and prevent permission creep.  

By implementing these and relying on activity data, we can improve our security posture and move towards Zero Trust, without disrupting identities’ ability to perform their daily job functions.