Hey Jedi welcome to the 93rd edition of the Identity Jedi Newsletter. FRIDAY FUN!

This weeks edition is coming in a little late, it’s been a very busy week. Some exciting news coming soon. But for now here’s what you’ve got coming in the Friday Edition. We’ll talk some Cyera and the 300 million reasons you should be worried about your data, we’ll talk Microsoft and why it’s actually a smart play for small businesses. ( Uggh…still doesn’t feel right). And some news coming from SailPoint.

Race to 1k

Ouch…rough week for the IDJ Newsletter. All of these are inactive subscribers. Total now sits at 456. Got a hill to climb, but we can do it!

AD under attack

An informative report released back in September detailing some attacks against Active Directory. No shock here that AD is constantly targeted by the bad guys, but something I found interesting was the discussion around hybrid environments with AD and Entra. Full Report is attached below.

Data is the new….gold??

Let’s talk data. You know the stuff that sits in your organization that you use to drive your business but you have no clue how much of it you have, where it sits, who has access to it, but it could single handly destroy your entire business if it gets in the wrong hands. Yeah that stuff.

( Sheesh Dave it’s Friday, cheer up)

300 Million dollars is a lot of money. Now I’m not declaring that Cyera is the superhero to come save the day ( they could be to be honest I’m not super familar with the company.) But what I am familiar with is how shitty we are at handling and securing data. Many of us have SCREAMED this at the top of our lungs for years that we’ve needed to do a better job of cleaning and protecting data. However..it’s hard, expensive, and business folk just don’t see the value.

Well enter in AI, which literally lives and breathes data. ( Well not yet…buuut) The fast moving speed at which we’ve seen AI services disrupt entire industries is a little scary. And it has CXO’s nervous about what that means for their data. ( Cuz ya know we’ve been doing such a great job of protecting it before).

I think this sparks a boom in the Data Security market, which will have a ripple affect into the identity market. If only someone would build a platform that helps you manage data AND the identities around that data…..

Sailing on..

Wanted to write about SailPoint going public again, but honestly this article does a great job. Am I kicking myself that I should have just spent the last four years at SailPoint and wouldn’t have gotten three different payouts, of course not…..

Best of luck, Sailpoint Crew

Shit, Microsoft’s products are actually good.

I can admit when I’m wrong. ( It doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen). I’ve given Microsoft so much shit for the past 15 years around their identity products, and I’ve refused to believe that they can actually build good ones.

Well, I was wrong. They can.

For a certain type of customer. ( See what I did there)

I’ve recently gotten the chance to play with a MS Premium environment and I was impressed with what I saw. I would dare go as far to say that you could build a complete IAM security infrastructure around the tools in MS given some caveats:

1) You are a small company ( I’m talking 3,000 users and under)

2) You are HEAVILY using Microsoft products. And when it’s not a MS product it’s a cloud based app.

3) You don’t have a need for deep entitlement analysis into applications.

Given those three things you will be good to go. Using MS’s Power Automate you can stitch together the workflows ( dare I say orchestration) you need to handle a majority of the identity use cases that would come up. The one hole is Non-Human Identity. They don’t have anything that touches that currently.

I’ll be diving in more over the next couple of weeks and I’ll keep you all posted on the progress. (Yes, I said that before, but this time I actually have access to an environment..lol).

Well done, Microsoft…well done.