Implement comprehensive Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) across cloud, on-prem, and legacy systems 

Ask the questions below to evaluate whether a vendor’s MFA is truly adaptive, risk-aware, and capable of protecting the full scope of your environment—including legacy systems, command-line tools, remote infrastructure, and applications that don’t support modern authentication protocols: 

Most MFA solutions weren’t designed to cover everything—leaving behind a long tail of unprotected systems, legacy protocols, and unmanaged interfaces. From command-line tools like PsExec to IT/OT infrastructure and custom apps, many critical assets simply don’t support traditional MFA. Even where MFA is deployed, implementation is often complex—requiring agents or proxies—and managing multiple MFA tools across on-prem and cloud leads to redundant costs and inconsistent user experience. 

What organizations truly need is universal MFA: the ability to extend MFA protection to any resource, without modifying servers or applications, and without being locked into a single MFA provider. 

Enforce least privilege access and contain active threats

Use the table below to assess whether vendors offer authentication-level protection across your hybrid environment: 

Internal Active Directory (AD) environments remain one of the most vulnerable and under-protected layers in the enterprise. Traditional network segmentation is costly, slow to deploy, and still lacks the precision to prevent identity-based threats. Once an attacker gains a foothold, there's often no way to stop lateral movement or privilege escalation without shutting down core business systems. Worse yet, most detection tools trigger only after the damage has already been done. 

What’s needed is inline enforcement at the point of authentication—deep within the IAM infrastructure, or Active Directory—so access can be blocked or challenged before a session is ever established. That’s where an authentication firewall comes in. An authentication firewall inspects every login attempt and continuously assesses risk—enforcing policy before the session begins. 

Protect all privileged users and prevent privileged escalation and abuse 

Instead of managing access with rigid vaulting, Privileged Access Security focuses on visibility, just-in-time access, and activity oversight. The following questions help evaluate if vendors go beyond legacy PAM to deliver flexible, risk-aware privileged access controls: 

Privileged accounts continue to be one of the most abused entry points in breaches and insider threats. Traditionally, privileged access management (PAM) solutions have been slow to deploy, complex to manage, and often fail to deliver meaningful protection. Onboarding can take months—or years—and privileged accounts often remain undiscovered or misclassified. Even when implemented, users and attackers can still bypass PAM controls, leaving critical systems exposed.  

What organizations truly need is a faster, more intelligent approach to privileged access—one that reduces overhead, eliminates blind spots, and enforces least privilege dynamically. This is why we’re proposing that your identity security platform should focus on Privileged Access Security (PAS).  

Discover, classify, and secure service accounts and other machine or non-human identities

Use the following checklist to ensure the solution secures every NHI across cloud, on-prem, and for all of your identity providers: 

Non-human identities (NHIs)—like service accounts, scripts, tokens, and automation keys—now outnumber human users in most environments 50:1, and this divide continues to grow. Yet these identities often operate in the shadows. They're difficult to discover, lack clear ownership, and are frequently granted excessive privileges. Even worse, they're regularly repurposed beyond their original intent and rarely deprovisioned, creating a sprawling and vulnerable attack surface. 

Securing NHIs requires more than secrets management or vaulting. Organizations need complete visibility, active control, and scalable automation to manage these identities throughout their lifecycle—across both cloud and on-prem environments. 

Detect and block credential abuse, stop lateral movement, reduce false positives, and activate real-time response 

Ask these questions to validate the vendor’s ability to detect and respond to identity-driven threats in real time: 

Attackers increasingly target identity as the weakest link—leveraging credential theft, privilege escalation, and lateral movement to bypass traditional defenses. In fact, over 80% of breaches involve stolen or compromised credentials, according to the 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report. Yet most detection and response tools weren’t built with identity in mind. They either generate noise without context or surface threats too late to act. IBM’s 2024 report shows it takes an average of 204 days to identify and contain a breach, often because tools focus on detection alone, without the means to interrupt an attack in real time. The result: endless alerts, high false positives, and limited ability to stop the breach before damage is done. Microsoft’s Digital Defense Report also notes that identity-based attacks have surged by over 250% year-over-year, underscoring the critical need for identity-first security strategies. 

To close these gaps, organizations need an ITDR solution that’s identity-native and proactive—not just reactive. The right ITDR tool can identify threats that target identity infrastructure—lateral movement, privilege escalation, and suspicious access patterns.

Improve identity security posture and proactively discover risks and remediate weaknesses across hybrid environments

Use the checklist below to confirm if the vendor supports continuous identity posture management and compliance alignment with your needs: 

The identity infrastructure is full of hidden exposures—misconfigurations, outdated protocols, excessive privileges, and insecure defaults that silently accumulate across legacy AD, cloud platforms, and SaaS environments. These weak points often go unnoticed until it's too late, leading to account takeovers, privilege escalation, lateral movement, and failed audits. Mapping and remediating these risks at scale is incredibly difficult—especially when teams lack centralized visibility and can’t prove progress to security leaders or compliance auditors. 

What organizations need is a proactive, scalable approach to harden their identity posture—one that delivers both continuous protection and measurable results. ISPM helps you assess, improve, and maintain identity hygiene—tracking configuration drift, excessive entitlements, and policy violations.