Comprehensive Security Platforms Move Strategic Defense Forward

Root Insurance Relies on Okta for IAM and Business Success

“Identity is fundamental to both our security and our operational efficiency,” Srinivasan says. “Okta delivers consistent access control across our application stack, which is made up of hundreds of Software as a Service applications. It also provides lifecycle management at scale, so we stay on top of our joiners, movers and leavers.”

Root Insurance’s Okta platform includes a range of security modules. Workforce Identity serves as its core, cloud-based IAM solution, securing and managing user access for employees, contractors and partners. The solution has helped teams and customers reduce password sprawl and strengthened policy enforcement throughout the organization.

Okta’s Lifecycle Management module oversees the entire user access lifecycle, including onboarding, role changes and offboarding, across the company’s many applications. “We use these modules to automate everything in our access lifecycle,” Srinivasan says. “This helps us maintain least-privilege access, onboard employees faster and support team members who are changing roles as the organization evolves. It meets our needs as a fast-growing business.”

In recent years, Root Insurance has expanded its use of Workflows, Okta’s no-code identity automation and orchestration module, to automate more complex identity-driven processes.

“Workflows provides automation without requiring much custom code,” Srinivasan says. “We can quickly adapt new processes as we expand. Whether we are launching in a new state, growing within embedded partnerships or scaling our independent agents’ platform, it allows our security team to be a key enabler of our business.”

As a government-regulated industry, auto insurance providers must follow shifting compliance mandates. Root Insurance takes the responsibility seriously and relies on Okta’s Identity Governance as a solution for maintaining and providing detailed, audit-ready reports on user access and approval history.

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“Identity Governance provides consistency to our compliance efforts as well as necessary evidence for regulators,” Srinivasan says. “It provisions centralized access logs and audit trails so we can meet compliance requirements, while also enforcing multifactor authentication, maintaining appropriate controls and administering periodic access certifications.”

Okta’s IAM platform delivers security and business value to Root Insurance across a wide range of operational needs. The company’s experience highlights a growing trend among enterprises toward a single provider that delivers comprehensive security resources rather than a piecemeal approach that requires integrating tools from multiple vendors.

“Even if you gain some slight advantage by going with a niche vendor for each security function, you need to be able to integrate all of them,” Srinivasan says. “You want visibility, a single pane for access control. That’s very difficult to do, because it requires technical capabilities and additional training for the workforce. Fortunately for us, Okta is leading the way with its platform.”

Comprehensive Security Platforms Built To Contain Today’s Threats

Comprehensive security platforms are not unique to IAM security products. Any integrated collection of security capabilities delivered through a unified architecture, management plane and data model can be considered a security platform. What distinguishes them from other packaged security tools is their purpose-built design, which shares telemetry, policy, analytics and automation natively across all included security features.

“A security platform is characterized not simply by its product portfolio but also by architectural cohesion,” explains Frank Dickson, group vice president for security and trust at IDC. “The unifying attribute is shared intelligence and operational consistency across control points. If point products are individual superheroes working independently, a platform is more like the Justice League, coordinating efforts in real time rather than fighting separate battles with separate playbooks.”

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Centralizing policy and management through a security platform allows the enterprise to define (and consistently enforce) security controls across the complex ecosystems most enterprises rely on, including on-premises, hybrid and multicloud environments.

“Centralized policy reduces configuration drift and limits inconsistencies that otherwise emerge when multiple tools are administered independently,” Dickson says. “A single administrative framework also simplifies governance, audit reporting and compliance validation.”

Businesses can tick off a long list of improvements made possible when they deploy comprehensive solutions, including faster mean times to detect and remediate, improved identification of high-fidelity threats, and fewer successful or high-impact security events, Dickson says. “When telemetry from identity, endpoint, network and cloud environments is correlated within a shared data model, detection becomes more contextual and less dependent on manual cross-tool analysis.”

UP NEXT: How to detect and prevent a “man in the middle” attack.

Sabre Improves Threat Response With Palo Alto Networks

For Sabre, an AI-native travel technology company based in Southlake, Texas, a comprehensive security solution from Palo Alto Networks keeps its global distribution systems and client systems available and safe from attack. More than 400,000 travel agents and millions of travelers rely on Sabre’s technology each day, making always-on availability essential.

“Outages are not an option,” says Scott Moser, Sabre’s senior vice president and CISO. “Operational effectiveness is incredibly important for us and our customers. Being able to deliver that to our airline customers, our travel agent customers and all of our partners is a foundational outcome.”

Sabre relies on a few core solutions from Palo Alto Networks to deliver comprehensive security for its infrastructure and systems: Cortex XSIAM, an AI-driven security operations center platform, which combines security data and analytics to automate detection and response; and Cortex XDR, which extends automated protection to Sabre’s endpoints. Sabre is currently shifting cloud security responsibilities from Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma to Cortex XSIAM, Moser says.

Prisma Access delivers secure access service edge protection through strong authentication to protect Sabre’s staff and applications. Palo Alto Networks’ Strata next-generation firewalls (including its P series physical devices) protect against external attacks, and its virtual firewalls (VM series) secure Sabre’s cloud environments.

“When I started in 2019, I had this vision of security automation,” Moser says. “Over the years, the platform approach has made this much easier to achieve. The products come fully integrated, orchestrated and automated. You turn it on and tune it, getting the right results much faster. We get to strong threat detection and response quickly, rather than spending months getting a variety of tools to work together.”

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How to Automate Threat Response

Cortex XSIAM has allowed Sabre to automate much of its threat detection and response. This year alone, Sabre has automated 75% of the monthly security events it logged. The solution helps its security operations teams respond at nearly the speed of an attack, timing that simply wasn’t possible through manual response.

“Faster identification and threat containment helps us avoid impacts and losses, and keeps our customers safe,” Moser says. “We’ve reduced security events and issues by 84% and have a near-real-time picture of the entire ecosystem, which is now optimized for detection. We’re able to tweak it so we have more true positives while filtering out the false positives. It gives us great confidence.”

Learn more about the Cortex XDR platform by Palo Alto Networks. 

Automating responses to meet most lower-level threats frees more time for the security team to focus on addressing more complex issues, including fraud. While it doesn’t happen often, “it’s a concern of our customers and can have an outsized impact,” Moser notes.

Still, his team has developed automated responses for fraudulent activities detected within the ecosystem.

“Using these detection tools to understand correct behavior makes it easier to see fraudulent behavior and build an automated response,” he says.