As businesses increasingly adopt cloud services and software-as-a-service solutions, the need for stronger identity security solutions has never been more critical.

Organizations are grappling with the growing complexity of managing data access and permissions, often struggling to ensure that users have only the access necessary for their roles. This situation underscores the necessity for advanced AI-driven solutions capable of efficiently handling permissions and entitlements, offering unparalleled visibility and control, according to Tarun Thakur (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of Veza Inc.

Veza’s Tarun Thakur talks to theCUBE about identity security solutions.

“The way we approach the topic of bringing identity to be a security posture-centric is you start with that visibility, that intelligence layer, we call it access graph, identity graph,” he said. “Then we help you understand is that access good, bad by a machine, by a set of critical findings. Then the way to bring it into the security context like a [security operations center] or like a security engineering team.”

Thakur spoke with theCUBE Research’s John Furrier and Savannah Peterson at the Black Hat USA event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the challenges of managing identity security in the multi-cloud and multi-identity era and Veza’s innovative AI-driven solutions to streamline permissions and entitlements through its Access AI platform. (* Disclosure below.)

The complexity of identity security solutions

One of the challenges facing the cybersecurity industry is the persistent difficulty of managing data access in a identity-driven world. As organizations continue to move data to the cloud, the fragmentation of permissions across multiple systems has become a significant hurdle, according to Thakur.

“If you look at gen AI now, these are all machine accounts. These are machine identities,” he said. “If you think of an AI app or an open AI, that’s nothing but a non-human, a machine identity … AI is actually making the problem a lot more worse and a lot more severe.”

Veza, a company founded to tackle these very challenges, has been at the forefront of developing solutions that address the principle of least privilege. Its latest innovation, Access AI, is designed to simplify and streamline the management of permissions and entitlements across various systems.

“What we’ve announced with Access AI is a set of ChatGPT-like interfaces,” Thakur said. “Now, you have a capability, a ChatGPT-like interface, a gen AI powered interface … every day we need access to things, go back to the AI, OpenAI as a compute instance needs access to some data that it can run as a machine … we’re calling it role recommendations, which is a very powerful interface.”

Looking ahead, Veza aims to democratize identity management by making it accessible to a wider range of stakeholders within organizations. Instead of being confined to IT departments, identity management should be integral to the roles of app owners, data owners and DevOps teams. This shift is essential for creating a more secure and resilient digital infrastructure.

“Can we make identity in the hands of an app owner, in the hands of a data owner, in the hands of a DevOps owner rather than it being a siloed function within the security team?” Thakur asked. “If we can democratize identity where a Snowflake owner, a Salesforce owner, an OpenAI ChatGPT owner can do least privilege, I think we have made a significant impact forward.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of the Black Hat USA event:

(* Disclosure: Veza Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Veza nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE