The importance of privileged identity management as a means of managing risk has long been understood. After all, it’s reported 43% of security breaches involve trusted insiders, according to research group Forrester. And the most recent Verizon Data Breach report revealed some 13% of breaches result from privilege misuse or abuse, and 76% involved weak or stolen credentials (of all types).
However, the widespread adoption of cloud computing has significantly increased the consequences of these risks. As was pointed out recently by Gartner Research Director Nick Nikols, “Administrators of private cloud and IaaS environments gain more concentrated power–and the risk that goes with it–than administrators for more traditional data center deployments.” The reason for this is the highly dynamic and scaleable nature of the cloud. Administrators can do much more, much faster than in traditional environments–and attacks scale up just as quickly.