According to research from Verizon Communications Inc., a full 81 percent of security breaches in the enterprise involve compromised user credentials. Okta Inc. and ServiceNow Inc. this morning launched a new jointly developed tool aimed at mitigating the threat.

The two cloud giants said the application draws on their respective technologies to enable faster response to attacks that exploit employee credentials. Okta supplies the account data by way of its identity management platform, which enables companies to control how workers access internal systems. This information is fed into ServiceNow’s namesake automation service, where it’s made available for security professionals to act upon.

According to the providers, the new app provides the ability to put the data to use in several ways. The first is by setting up security workflows that automatically trigger in response to certain incidents.

A bank, for instance, might have Okta Identity Cloud for Security Operations lock users out of a financial application if they try to download a large amount of data at once. Okta and ServiceNow said the ability to respond in real time makes it possible to limit the scope of a breach “drastically.” Plus, administrators can reduce the impact of false positives too by customizing what measure is taken based on incident severity.

Having visibility into what role individual users play in a security breach is also handy after the fact. Identifying what account was responsible for an incident can normally take an extended period of time since administrators must manually sift through logs from the affected systems. The bigger the scope of the attack, the longer the process becomes.

To speed up the process, Okta Identity Cloud for Security Operations overlays the relevant user information directly on the ServiceNow interface. Administrators can see what users were involved in a breach and check recent account activity to find potential compromises that may have slipped under the radar.

Image: Pixabay