Identity security platform startup Stack Identity Inc. today announced Shadow Access Risk Assessment Freemium, a free service that provides users with a daily report of shadow access risks in their environment.

Shadow access risk — the risk posed by unauthorized access to information technology resources and systems when employees use unauthorized devices, applications, or credentials to access corporate systems — is a well-known problem. Stack Identity argues that the rapid proliferation of large language models, ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence-driven applications have significantly expanded access to enterprise data, adding to the shadow access risk problem by leading to a surge in entitlements and privileges granted to human and nonhuman entities.

The complexity and scale of cloud identity, access and entitlements are said to make it extremely difficult for security practitioners to understand and quickly identify the most pertinent risks. Slack Identity says few products on the market directly address the needs of overburdened security engineers who deal with constant alerts, false positives and an overwhelming amount of data spread across multiple tools and systems. This is where Shadow Access Risk Assessment steps in.

SARA is deployed directly into a customer’s cloud environment to comprehensively assess and analyze different cloud events and identify emerging shadow access risks. With SARA, customers receive a daily email recapping any new threats that have originated in the past 24 hours and a call to action for security practitioners to remediate shadow access rather than simply detect it.

“The fundamental law of cybersecurity is you can’t protect what you don’t know about, and this is especially important when you consider that identities provide the literal keys to the kingdom,” noted Jack Poller, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. ”Understanding the dynamic and changing nature of which identities have access to sensitive data and critical resources is crucial for reducing organizational risk.”

SARA is deployed and runs locally within a customer’s on-premise trust boundary and is claimed to reduce the customer’s mean time to detection by 60% to 80%.

“We developed SARA to ease the burden of identity threat detection for security practitioners across industries,” said Stack Identity founder and Chief Executive Venkat Raghavan. “Rather than spending valuable time manually compiling data, SARA users receive a comprehensive, daily assessment of shadow access risks, allowing them to focus their time on eliminating security threats instead of uncovering them.”

Stack Identity launched with $4 million in seed funding in April. The company counts WestWave Capital LLC, Benhamou Global Ventures LLC and Plug and Play Tech Center LLC among its investors.

Image: Stack Identity