Identity access management company Okta Inc. today announced the general availability of a new service that helps companies optimize their identity security posture.

The new Security Center service is an attack protection service that leverages insights from the Okta Customer Identity Cloud to provide a single view of authentication events, potential security incidents and threat response efficacy. It includes real-time data on a company’s current state of attack protection, with threat monitoring of attack vectors and application-level visibility into authentication traffic.

Okta is pitching the release as tackling the issue where an organization’s security posture can be too restrictive or too lax. To determine posture, organizations need to parse through logs and third-party tools to identify attacks effectively and be ready to respond to them. That’s where Security Center steps in.

The service leverages Okta Customer Identity Cloud security insights to provide teams with a faster way to detect and respond to identity threats. It offers a streamlined view of authentication events, potential incidents and threat response efficacy, allowing security teams to optimize their security posture without excessive added costs or creating an in-house solution.

“As attacks against identity flows get more sophisticated and evolve to bypass detection, security teams often have to go through a learning curve on their own production environments, which can mean delayed detection of attacks and consequent business losses,” Jameeka Aaron, chief information security officer for customer identity at Okta, said in a blog post. “Security Center leverages our focused expertise in identity security and packages it in a way that security operations professionals can understand and take action.”

Security Center also features the ability to measure the user experience impacts of any attack protection features applied by organizations. Okta says attack protection features must balance security with user experience — balancing friction while maintaining appropriate protections against identity attacks.

The new service shows the user experience effects of defense tactics, allowing organizations to adjust security and friction as they best determine. Using it, companies can fine-tune their attack protection strategy by seeing in near-real time how defense tactics such as multifactor authentication, rate limiting and CAPTCHAs affect their applications and the way they’re used.

Photo: Okta