Identity threats in the cyber battleground

With traditional cyber defences constantly improving, the battle against hackers has moved onto the identity arena.

The channel has been bolstering its portfolios with vendors that can counter the identity threats – an effort that will need to continue as criminals continue to look for routes into datacentres and user systems.

Ev Kontsevoy, cofounder and CEO of Teleport, is on the frontline fending off the threat, raising the profile of identity attacks to ensure the channel can help protect their customers.

“All the hacking happens through some kind of remote access protocol because attackers are not physically walking into datacentres,” he said. “You can think about cloud environments like AWS, or Azure or GCP, or IoT [internet of things] platforms. All of those are infrastructure, and Teleport controls secure and remote access into these things. So, we’re like an epicentre of this cyber security crisis that the world is in.”

Kontsevoy said that the continued expansion of servers, Kubernetes and microservices was adding more complexity to datacentres and more areas hackers could exploit.

“Because the  complexity of computing is increasing, organisations are adding more topologies. So, they end up with more remote [tech], and every single remote protocol requires expertise to secure it – you have to set up encryption, login and authentication, and so on,” he said.

“You need experts for every single [remote access control]. There are so many different...silos of identities all over the infrastructure. That leads to complexity.”

At the same time, the attacks from criminals have become more advanced, using artificial intelligence (AI) tools to mimic personnel to encourage staff to share details and transfer funds.

From a channel perspective, the increasing identity threat is providing opportunities and a momentum to talk to customers around protecting remote workforce environments.

Teleport is giving partners the chance to get hold of its technology via cloud marketplaces, having established a relationship with AWS on that front.

“We support the major cloud vendors technology, such as AWS, Azure, GCP. The AWS partnership is a strategic collaboration agreement for go-to-market that developed because of the rapid growth of customers buying through AWS marketplace,” said Kontsevoy.

Customers have continually placed security at the top of their list of concerns ,and it was a main priority in the recent TechTarget and ESG 2024 technology spending intentions in EMEA research. Users are looking to spend on various types of technology, with security leading the way, followed by cloud, data management, automation and IT services management.