Highlights:

  • According to Lacework, the extensive range of over 35,000 detailed permissions provided by hyper-scale cloud providers poses challenges for organizations in effectively restricting unnecessary access.

Recently, Lacework Inc., a cloud security company, unveiled new features in cloud identity and entitlement management (CIEM). These enhancements aim to enhance the visibility of cloud identities and aid in detecting potential identity threats.

The recently introduced features are intended to assist organizations in comprehending the capabilities of specific identities and evaluating their associated risks. Through the dynamic discovery of cloud user identities, groups, roles, and permissions, the platform identifies identities with excessive privileges. Lacework’s CIEM platform assigns a risk score to each identity and provides recommendations for permission adjustments based on past observations.

According to Lacework, the extensive range of over 35,000 detailed permissions provided by hyper-scale cloud providers poses challenges for organizations in effectively restricting unnecessary access. As a result, cloud users and instances often possess more permissions than necessary, creating vulnerabilities that could lead to cloud breaches, compromised accounts, and data exfiltration. Compounding the issue is that machine identities in the cloud typically outnumber human identities by a factor of 10.

Lacework has developed a solution to this issue by dynamically identifying and analyzing all cloud user identities, groups, roles, and associated permissions. This enables the platform to automatically correlate granted permissions with their actual usage and identify users with excessive privileges.

These features enable organizations to continuously comply with identity and access management security and regulatory needs. They mitigate the consequences of compromised cloud accounts and identify risky behavior patterns without manually creating rules or piecing together separate alerts.

In anticipation of the announcement, Lacework’s Vice President of Product, Adam Leftik, commented, “Our customers need to know what entities are actually doing in their cloud and whether it’s malicious or inappropriate and it can’t get in the way of their ability to move fast. Now Lacework customers can address both sides of the identity security issue with a single platform that prevents identity risk exposure and detects identity threats at scale, with the context to quickly investigate, prioritize and respond to identity alerts.”

According to Crunchbase, Lacework is a startup with significant venture capital funding totaling USD 1.9 billion, that it raised in November 2021. Notable investors in Lacework include Franklin Templeton Investments, Google Ventures LLC, Liberty Global Ventures LLC, Alumni Ventures Group LLC, Dragoneer Investment Group LLC, and Altimeter Capital LP.