Policy Compliance Doesn’t Tell You If a Credential Was Just Stolen
Identity governance and administration manages who should have access and enforces that policy through provisioning, certification, and segregation of duties. Anomali unifies identity data with endpoint, network, and cloud telemetry in the same schema, so anomalous account behavior, privilege changes, and cross-domain misuse surface as threats, not just as audit findings reviewed long after the fact.
Key Takeaways
Identity is the modern breach vector, but many SIEMs lack a first-class identity provider feed, leaving identity attacks under-investigated
Privilege escalation commonly precedes lateral movement, but routine entitlement changes are usually too numerous to review manually
Insider threats and data exfiltration require correlating access, movement, and egress together, no single log source tells the whole story
Why This Is Different
Identity governance tools answer “should this account have this access” not “is this account being used by someone other than its owner right now.” That second question requires identity data to live in the same correlated layer as endpoint, network, and email activity, which is exactly what happens by normalizing identity provider events into the same schema as everything else.
The typical setup treats identity as its own island: the identity provider console, the EDR console, and whatever governance platform owns policy, three systems that don’t talk to each other unless an analyst manually pivots between them. That’s the same “two layers meeting manually, alert by alert” pattern that shows up everywhere else in this market, just with an identity provider console standing in for a SIEM.
With Anomali, identity provider events normalize into the same schema as endpoint, network, and cloud data, so a session doesn’t need to be reconstructed by hand across three logins. And because intelligence is fused in at the data level, an anomalous privilege change or a credential tied to known threat activity surfaces as a scored signal, not a line in an audit log someone has to notice on their own.
Identity Governance Use Cases
Identity-centric triage
Pain: Identity is the modern breach vector, but many SIEMs lack a first-class identity provider feed, leaving identity attacks under-investigated.
Today: Analysts pivot manually between the identity provider console and the EDR console to piece together a session.
With Anomali: An account’s recent session and device context reconstruct on one screen by correlating identity provider and endpoint events already in the same schema.
Privilege-change flagging
Pain: Privilege escalation commonly precedes lateral movement, but routine entitlement changes are usually too numerous to review manually.
Today: Entitlement changes logged in the identity provider but rarely reviewed outside a compliance audit, long after the fact.
With Anomali: Anomalous privilege changes that precede lateral movement flag near real time, not the entire audit log at once.
Insider-threat and data exfiltration detection
Pain: Insider threats and data exfiltration require correlating access, movement, and egress together. No single log source tells the whole story.
Today: DLP, identity, and network egress data live in separate tools, reviewed independently, making the full exfil chain hard to reconstruct.
With Anomali: Database access, DLP and email, identity, and network data correlate together to reconstruct the full access-to-egress chain in one view.
FAQ
What named frameworks does Anomali map to for the Threat Intelligence use case?
Every indicator maps to MITRE ATT&CK and normalizes through STIX/TAXII for interoperability, so intelligence is portable in the vocabulary your whole security organization already uses.
Does this replace platforms like SailPoint, Saviynt, or Okta?
No. It adds a threat-detection layer that identity governance and access management platforms don’t natively provide, designed to feed those systems additional risk context rather than replace their governance functions.
What’s the difference between identity governance and identity threat detection?
Governance manages who should have access and enforces that policy. Threat detection identifies when access, regardless of policy compliance, is being used by someone other than the legitimate owner.
How does privilege-change flagging avoid becoming just another audit log to review?
By flagging only the anomalous changes that precede known lateral-movement patterns, not logging every entitlement change for later review. The volume an analyst sees drops from “the whole log” to “the handful that matter.”
Can identity data really live in the same view as endpoint and network data?
Yes. Identity provider events normalize into the same schema as endpoint, network, and cloud data, which is what makes session reconstruction and cross-domain correlation possible without a separate identity-specific tool.
Challenge The Status Quo