Unified Identity Protection Explained

What is unified identity protection?

Identity-based attacks are one of the top cyber threats today, with adversaries exploiting compromised credentials, weak authentication controls, and privilege escalation to infiltrate environments. With threats intensifying across hybrid cloud and on-prem environments, a siloed approach to identity management falls short. This is where unified identity protection becomes essential—a security-first approach that combines identity management with real-time threat detection and response to stop adversaries before they can exploit identity vulnerabilities. This proactive approach ensures organizations aren’t just reacting to attacks but are actively fortifying their identity infrastructure against future risks.

Unlike traditional IAM solutions, unified identity protection integrates identity management capabilities (SSO, MFA, conditional access) with real-time threat detection, risk-based authentication, and continuous monitoring across identity, endpoint, and cloud environments. By consolidating these capabilities into a unified platform, you gain full visibility into the attack paths across the layers of your digital infrastructure. This unified perspective allows you to see how threats can travel across identity systems, endpoints, and SaaS applications, providing a panoramic view of potential threats that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Benefits of unified identity protection

Unified identity protection does more than just safeguard credentials—it brings significant, practical benefits to the entire security landscape. Here’s a closer look at the key benefits it provides for organizations:

Centralized identity management

Unified identity protection streamlines the management of identities across multiple environments, combining all identity data, access controls, and threat protection into a single platform. By unifying security and identity protections, security teams gain full visibility into authentication activity, privilege escalation, and anomalous access attempts across cloud and on-prem systems—without the blind spots of fragmented tools. This approach ultimately decreases the risks associated with fragmented identity security tools.

Enhanced security

By consolidating identity security and real-time threat detection, unified identity protection helps prevent credential-based attacks and limits lateral movement within the network. With real-time monitoring and behavioral analytics, organizations can detect and disrupt adversary activity.

Improved visibility

With unified identity protection, you achieve unparalleled end-to-end visibility across your identity estate. This all-encompassing view enables security teams to monitor every identity and access point, eliminating the blind spots where attackers often thrive. By correlating telemetry data across the identity management and threat protection domains, you gain a unified perspective that amplifies your ability to spot and eliminate risks before they escalate.

Simplified compliance

Meeting regulatory requirements becomes much easier with unified identity protection, thanks to centralized logging and auditing tools. These features simplify reporting processes, reduce the workload tied to compliance, and ensure that organizations are audit-ready, ultimately supporting adherence to industry standards and regulatory frameworks. By maintaining this level of identity protection oversight, you can proactively address threats and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. 

How does unified identity protection work?

Unified identity protection does more than just safeguard credentials—it brings significant, practical benefits to the entire security landscape. Here’s a closer look at the key benefits it provides for organizations:

Centralized identity management

A modern identity security solution unifies essential capabilities to combat adversaries from the start. It integrates telemetry seamlessly from customer endpoints, workloads, identities, and data to deliver accurate threat detections and real-time protection—without overwhelming your SOC personnel. By merging identity management tools like SSO, MFA, and adaptive authentication with endpoint and cloud security, this approach ensures every layer of identity protection operates in unison, forming a robust defense against sophisticated, evolving threats.

Risk-based authentication

Risk-based authentication dynamically adjusts security requirements based on real-time risk signals—such as device security posture, geo-location, and login anomalies—instead of relying on static MFA policies. Conditional access is a set of customizable rules that determine whether access to corporate data is granted or denied based on factors such as device type, location, unusual behavior, device settings and various other conditions. This capability empowers organizations to dynamically manage access based on real-time risk assessments, ensuring that security measures are responsive and intelligent.

When risky authentication behavior is detected, risk-based conditional access can activate MFA to add an extra layer of security. MFA requires users to provide additional verification, such as a one-time code sent to their phone, before granting access. This ensures that even if a threat actor tries to exploit a vulnerability, they face an additional hurdle. Risk-based conditional access ensures that the system preserves a smooth user experience for those who don’t pose a risk while remaining vigilant against adversaries.

Continuous monitoring

By continuously analyzing authentication and session data, the system establishes a baseline for normal user behavior, using machine learning to detect deviations that indicate compromised credentials, adversary lateral movement, or privilege abuse. It leverages real-time identity telemetry to analyze and identify adversaries’ tactics and targeting patterns, assessing the likelihood that a sign-in attempt was made by someone other than the authorized account holder. By identifying risky access attempts as they happen, organizations can hit the brakes on potential threats before they can escalate.

Preventing identity threats with unified identity protection

Unified identity protection is a powerful strategy for preventing identity-related threats by providing comprehensive defense mechanisms that thwart identity security threats, such as:

Credential-based attack prevention

Even with MFA, adversaries bypass security using MFA fatigue attacks, session hijacking, and credential stuffing. Unified identity protection detects and blocks adversary techniques in real-time, preventing unauthorized access even when credentials are compromised. By leveraging advanced authentication techniques like MFA and behavioral analytics, it ensures that only legitimate users gain access to sensitive systems, thwarting credential-based attacks before they can take root.

Lateral movement prevention

Attackers often exploit compromised identities to move laterally within a network, escalating their access and deepening their reach within your environment. Once an attacker gains a foothold using stolen credentials, they attempt to move laterally using pass-the-hash, Kerberoasting, and golden ticket attacks. Unified identity protection stops this by dynamically restricting access, revoking active sessions, and enforcing adaptive authentication in response to suspicious privilege escalation. Adopting a platform that integrates your security controls lets you tap into powerful tools and telemetry to spot signs of lateral movement and enforce identity-driven protection measures.

For example, a unified identity security platform can detect unusual user behavior like logins from unexpected locations and seamlessly activate policies that initiate additional authentication requests.

Key features

A modern identity security solution takes a fundamentally different approach by unifying the capabilities you need to combat adversaries from the start. It integrates comprehensive identity management into a single platform that also includes endpoint, identity and cloud security. This integration ensures every facet of identity security operates in unison, providing a robust and unified defense against evolving threats. Additional capabilities include:

Risk-based conditional access

Enforces phishing-resistant MFA (FIDO2, certificate-based authentication) to prevent MFA bypass attacks while dynamically adapting security policies based on real-time risk signals. By dynamically applying MFA based on risk factors, you can ensure that only authorized users gain access to sensitive resources and reduce the burden on your SOC team.

Single sign-on (SSO)

SSO allows users to securely access multiple applications with one set of credentials, simplifying the login process and enhancing security by minimizing the number of passwords users need to manage.

Multi-factor authentication (MFA)

MFA adds an extra layer of security by requiring multiple verification steps, making it significantly harder for attackers to gain access with stolen credentials alone. By combining something users know (like a password) with something they have (such as a mobile device or security token), MFA strengthens access controls and minimizes the risk of unauthorized access.

Identity analytics

Identity analytics combines real-time telemetry with adversary intelligence to detect credential stuffing, session hijacking, and privilege escalation attempts before attackers can establish persistence. By integrating threat intelligence with identity protection, this capability enables real-time blocking of suspicious access attempts, reducing the risk of unauthorized access and providing an extra layer of proactive defense.

Top best practices for unified identity protection

A unified approach to identity protection is crucial for maintaining a strong security posture. The following best practices lay the foundation for an effective defense strategy to ensure that identity threats are detected and mitigated before they can impact your organization.

Data encryption

Securing identity data demands airtight protection, which starts with encryption. Encrypting identity-related data both at rest and in transit is an essential practice to ensure that even if attackers intercept or access stored data, they can’t make sense of it without the decryption keys. With encryption in place, you’re making it infinitely harder for adversaries to get to the core of your identity assets.

Role-based access control (RBAC)

The principle of “least privilege” is key, and RBAC puts this into action. By assigning permissions based on user roles, you’re limiting access to only what’s necessary, reducing exposure, and minimizing potential misuse. Whether a user needs access to customer data or just internal resources, RBAC keeps privileges tightly in check to ensure that no one has more access than they absolutely need. This keeps the identity attack surface as small as possible and makes it easier to detect any anomalies.

Continuous monitoring

With identity threats constantly evolving, continuous monitoring is a must. AI-driven monitoring tools track user behaviors in real time, instantly flagging unusual patterns. Whether it’s an unexpected location change or access attempts at odd hours, continuous monitoring proactively keeps you aware of any risk to your identity access. This real-time insight empowers you to catch adversaries in the act and respond faster than ever.

Incident response planning

Traditional incident response plans focus on malware and network threats but overlook identity-based attacks. Organizations must establish a dedicated Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) plan to rapidly respond to credential theft, privilege escalation, and session hijacking before attackers can spread. When identity-based threats hit, you need a playbook that’s ready to go. A well-developed response plan guides your team’s actions and enables them to act quickly. From detection through to resolution, every step should be documented and tested, This ensures the team isn’t scrambling under pressure but is executing a polished, effective response.

Multimedia training

To maximize the impact of these best practices, consider including multimedia training resources for your users and security. A video that breaks down key concepts in simple terms can help clarify complex strategies and make it easier for your team to understand and implement them. Multimedia can also bring your unified identity protection approach to life to help your users understand the importance of these identity security methods while effectively using them in their daily operations.

Identity Protection with CrowdStrike

Unified identity protection streamlines identity management while significantly boosting security across diverse environments. By consolidating identity management, threat detection, and access controls into a single platform, organizations can gain better visibility, mitigate risks, and respond to threats faster. By integrating identity protection with security operations, organizations gain continuous visibility, adaptive security, and proactive threat response—stopping identity-based attacks before they cause damage. With this modern approach to identity protection, organizations can outpace emerging threats and gain the upper hand in the ever-evolving cybersecurity battle.