The organization’s recipe to manage the Identity and Access Management (IAM) of users and employees to access cloud resources, distributed workforce, and shadow IT was dependent on Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). But, according to recent reports and analysis, cybercriminals managed to maneuver against MFA with real-time phishing proxies to harvest session cookies and evasion tools.

The incremental push towards GenAI by the IAM security vendors has started to capture its position in the IAM landscape and redefine the use of in IAM in enterprises in the following ways:

1. Intelligent Access policy management: GenAI’s capability to analyze large datasets of access management policy, which is programmed using assembly-level language, in real-time to identify anomalies, identity patterns, and user behaviors within the organization ecosystem. Also, its ability to provide real-time contexts of the access requests against the present policies, as well as generate new policies based on the high-level language, enabling organizations to implement more adaptive IAM controls.

• Insider threat challenges: The capability of GenAI to create auto-deployed decoys, enhanced behavioral detection, and asset graph technology to combat insider threats and zombie credentials.

• Application access rights: GenAI’s capability to generate low-level rules and policies enables in generating and managing the credentials and access rules for the employees and group memberships and deploy changes in the access policies.

• Personalization of Access requests: GenAI’s capability to perform real-time analysis of large datasets enables it to understand the user access needs and behaviors including access requests, tasks performed, and roles within the organization.

• Reduction of False positive: The GenAI’s capability to dynamically identify security threats in access requests, enables in the identification of threats which are code mutating and evading conventional ML-based IAM systems, reducing the false positives in alerting, and adapting to complex and evolving fraudulent patters.

However, the emergence of GenAI in the IAM landscape presents a promising shift towards more adaptive and intelligent access management solutions. GenAI offers capabilities such as intelligent access policy management, enhanced insider threat detection, personalized access requests, and dynamic threat identification, addressing key challenges faced by enterprises in managing IAM in today's distributed and complex IT environments. Leveraging the capabilities of GenAI can bring robust security measures and dynamic analytics to Identity and Access Management (IAM) landscape bolstering operational efficiency, and security in IAM frameworks.

Authors: : Kaushik V, Analyst at Quadrant Knowledge Solutions